Yesterday's opening featured the event--just exactly how I got this rip down the cheek. This morning's post begins the long aftermath. There's far more here than I ever needed to say, I'm sure. Bear with me.
~*~*~*~
In moments, I was long ago told, both parents and grandparents were at there the sight of the accident, bemoaning the bloody face I wore." I was almost two, so I started bawling. My momma told me I was going to be all right but we needed to visit the doctor, although I'm not sure I knew what a doctor was.
I’m told I had quite a few gashes over my face, but one was both deep and wide, running the up my face, left side. Hence, me and Cain.
I've always simply assumed the doctor failed to sew the big slice shut quite as tightly as he should have, so the scar, even as it healed, remained visibly wide.
Scars turn white, right? Not this one. For years, this three-inch-er I carry remained steadfastly crimson and thus came to dominate first impressions, made me look, well, apprehensive.
But for me, of course, the carrier, the scar became second nature, so much a part of me that I long ago forgot I had it. But whenever we moved to a new place I remembered. Or else when we met chatty new people. Some few blurt it out--generally old folks, medical frequent flyers who take note and then rehearse their own old surgeries and quite baldly expose their own battle scars to empathize, I suppose.
"Hello. I'm Jim--Jim Schaap, originally from Wisconsin.”
"Bill. Bill Sanderson--where the hell did you get that scar? Want to see mine?”
It's rarely a question. You learn to live with their revelations. When I was younger, I avoided the flashing by simply making a game out of the answer, telling him or her what I imagined they'd like to hear.
“Well, I was down in Chicago one night. . . " You know, some horror with a whacked off beer bottle.
The first basemen of a small college in South Dakota once asked me a what the heck had happened top me the moment I reached first.
"Got it in a little fight," I told him.
"Oh, yeah?” he says, begging the story to go on.
I had his full attention when, just like that, the chucker picked me off. Never saw it coming. I wondered what the first basemen used on other guys.
As I grew up, the storied means by which I had acquired the scar changed. When I was a little boy, some moms would always ask mine if a cat was the culprit. Mom always felt bad about that. She hates cats. Never really bothered me.
Early adolescence was a strange time. People didn’t know what to ask since it was too early for a fight and too late for a cat. Besides talking about pimples was hard enough for a kid that age. I didn't need the scar.
One day in the seventh grade, we opened our books to a story in our reading class titled, "Old Scarface", about an old whale I think. I never looked up from my book for the whole hour so I didn't see the stares. Sure enough, I knew they were there.
In high school, I was among the first to have a sideburn, even though I hadn't touched a blade. My shoulders broadened, and I began to grow into a normal human being except for that orange-ish ugliness running down the left side of my face. Sooner or later, most of the kids I knew heard the true story, but when we'd meet new kids, some lusty Romeo would say, "What the heck did you do to her?"
Thus began my life as a story teller. In college it was most often a full-fledged barroom brawl, but the "passionate lover" was still occasionally referenced to late- night bull sessions. Bigots claimed it had to be racial. Outdoorsmen, had me chasing a some monster buck through naked winter foliage. Girls, well, why let the cat out of the bag; half of romance was intrigue and the other half was deception anyway. Besides, when I was sixteen or so, I asked myself, who'd really want to tell the real story? I was two, my sister was five. . .
That's lame.
(still more tomorrow, if you can handle it. . .)
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