Marked with Life

When the weather is warm, walk anywhere in Belmont Shore and you are bound to see folks dressed in less. We have our fair share of culturally accepted beauties and probably just as many of people like me (short, fat, funny-looking). But this post isn't about what makes us beautiful, it's more about what makes us interesting. I'm talking about scars.

The outward physical ones are easier to deal with. They serve as a reminder that the human form is vulnerable, that mistakes do happen, that we can get carried away with things, surprisingly, to our own detriment. I have a few scars on the outside. My left thumb is bigger than my right. This was not always so but one day when I was working with a paper cutter at work trimming some books I couldn't get them to stay flat so I put my left hand in the back, well away from the blade and by a rather unique operation, if I do say so myself, I circumnavigated the safety features and brought the hydraulic clamp down, not just on the books, but on my poor unsuspecting thumb. In an instant I knew I had made a horrible mistake and when I pulled my hand out to look, my thumb was crushed and bloody. "I think I need to go to the hospital" I told the pressman in a stupor. It took months for it to resemble a thumb again, some of the nerves were severed and so it is difficult to pick small delicate things up because I have little sensitivity. Stupid, stupid mistake.

Another is about seven inches long, right about my belt line, three inches from my navel. The day I got that scar my stomach had been hurting for a few days, not like nausea, but just a dull ache. I knew I would be near the urgent care that day so I just stopped in to get checked out. The doctor examined me and told me to check in at the hospital because my appendix had burst and I would need an operation. I was totally not expecting that. I remember asking him if an operation was really necessary and he just laughed. So I drove over to the hospital, parked the car and called my wife, who was out, so I left a message. By the time she called the hospital I was already in surgery.

A friend of mine who was a transcriptionist at the hospital saw my name in the record and came to see me after the operation. "You were in pretty bad shape," he told me, "another two hours and they would've had to carry you in." That scar only shows when I go swimming. If asked, I'd like to tell people that I got it in a knife fight but no one has ever asked.

The traces of it are all gone but for a long time my skin had been discolored after taking a fall from a mountain bike. My son and I had biked down a mountain road one day and I just couldn't stop in time and slid on my left arm until the mountain had embedded pea size gravelly bits into me. After it stopped hurting I would look at that and remember what a great day we had hurtling down the mountain at breakneck speed.

I have a few other scars, some a little more private or that I'd be too embarrassed to talk about. I used to not like these scars of mine. At first they felt like a disfigurement. But now I sort of see them as the way life has carved me, the way a river carves a gorge or a tree is shaped by the wind. The scars are stories of things that happened to me. Unlike the unseen scars of my psyche, the trauma of these scars is long over, the pain, like the wind or the river has rolled on.

The other scars, the hidden ones that seem to heal so incredibly slowly, those have stories too, I'm still overcoming those. They have a chiseling power of their own but cut so much deeper. They are still carving me.

Tim Bulone is an ardent observer of life on the swirling blue marble. He works at Davis Group Consulting and creates fine art and canvas prints which he likes to sell from time to time at http://www.MyFamilyArt.com He is an early morning pedestrian in Belmont Shore, where he resides with his wife and a variety of underachieving pets.