Trending
In the course of taking a trailer-full of Allison Elementary kindergarten students on a pumpkin patch tractor ride, I stopped the tractor, climbed off and picked up a large, flat, red pumpkin of the vin rouge variety and placed it carefully in the midst of the dozen munchkins seated on old lawn chair seat cushions.
My original intent was simply to show them a beautiful pumpkin of a different type, but this particular vin rouge had a large, rough, brown patch on top. I was inspired to digress, a not unusual habit of mine.
"You know how if you get a cut, it makes a scab and then sometimes leaves a scar?" I said to the children. "That's what this is: a scar. A deer took a few bites out of this pumpkin when it was green. Usually that will make the pumpkin rot and die, but this one healed, and it left this scar.
"You might think it's ugly, but I think it's beautiful, because the pumpkin lived. It was badly hurt, but it didn't die. The scar tells the story."
Of course this prompted the children to tell scar stories of their own or of a family member, all talking over each other. You wouldn't think small children would have much in the way of scars to tell, but in a class of 50 children who visited our pumpkin patch, we had been advised there were two or three facing serious health issues. Doubtless they have some scars, visible or not.
Having lived a long and incautious life, I have plenty of scars that I could have told them about. In fact, I was working on a new one at the time.
Two days earlier, I was stacking firewood when I dropped one end-first on my right foot. It was a very small log, and I was wearing work boots, but it landed on edge, exactly one-eighth inch behind the toenail on my great toe. The initial pain was excruciating, and though pain subsided quickly and almost completely, it bled for days.
"You've probably broken the nail bed," pronounced my wife, the family doctor, as she examined the bloody mess. "You'll lose the toenail and if it does grow back it may be deformed, like the nail on my ring finger where a dog bit me."
Honey displayed the fingernail in question, which has a ridge down the middle to remind her of the injury. Her hands, and to a lesser extent her arms, are a web of scars from bites and scratches, the legacy of a long career as a small animal veterinarian.
I showed her a similar scar and nail ridge on the little finger of my left hand, recalling the mental picture of when I as a small boy mashed it in the hinge of my father's fold-down desk.
Remember in the film "Jaws" when the characters portrayed by Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfus took turns comparing scars to one-up each other? Men have always done that. Dueling scars, for example. I can see a caveman telling his buds, "This one from saber-tooth tiger."
When the grandsons sustain a bad cut or scrape, we remind them that a scar will be the reward because "Chicks dig scars."
All scars are not beautiful, of course. Those which disfigure or impede function, or which are reminders of tragic accidents and losses, are emotional landmarks on our bodies of things we might prefer not to remember. But even those scars are a testament to life.
I'll close with some quotes from the internet about scars.
"I don't want to die without any scars." (Chuck Palahnuik, Fight Club)
". . .the most massive characters are seared with scars." (Kahlil Gibran)
"Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real." (Cormac McCarthy)
"Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal." (Leonard Cohen)
"I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. . .It should bloody well show." (Janet Fitch)
"The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus." (Wallace Stegner)
"On the girl's brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dress? . . . We must see all scars as beauty, OK? . . .A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived." (Chris Cleave)
Fred Miller's third book of stories, "A Dead Carp on Shadyside Ave." is $10 and available locally at Calcutta Giant Eagle, Pottery City Antique Mall, Museum of Ceramics, Frank's Pastries, Davis Bros. pharmacies, Connie's Kitchen restaurant, and the Old Ft. Steuben gift shop.