The physical kind
April 30, 2008 (Wednesday)
Been writing lately about my pre-school days in Houston. Got to thinking about some scars I have, that go back to my childhood. There’s one in an eyebrow, one under my arm, one on my foot, and one in my mind.
The one in my eyebrow got there at my grandmother’s house. She did the washing in her back yard, and began by building a fire under a huge round black pot, colored that way by the smoke from the fire. I fell on the rim of that big vessel, hitting my head and creating a gash above my eye. Those were depression days, so there was no doctor, no stitches, no bandaids. But it healed. And left a scar. It’s still faintly there, these 70 plus years later. My grandmother washed clothes back then just as she had for years: boiling water, scrubbing on a rub board, rinsing with bluing, wringing by hand, and hanging on the clothes line. It was hard work and took a whole day. Wanda’s grandmother used to say she gave her seven kids a dose of paregoric on Sundays so they would sleep on Mondays while she did the wash. Ah, the “good old days.”
The scar under my arm, also still there today, was made by the brace (a flexible strap) that was put on me after I broke my collar bone at age 5. As it moved it acted as a saw of sorts, and dug into my flesh. The accident that caused the break happened when my father was playing “horsy” with my baby sisters, letting them ride on his back, and I decided to join in without his knowledge. The result was a short fall to the floor. I was bad about doing things I shouldn’t. Did any of my readers have a kid like that? Don’t despair – he’ll probably become a preacher some day.
The scar on my foot was made when I was 9 or 10 years old, as I joined a circle of boys playing mumbly peg on the filthy soil of a city curb. Stuck the knife into my bare foot. (The game was played with pocket knives released by each player in such a way as to create leaps and tumbles by the knife until it reached the ground within the circle of players, stuck in the ground with two finger-width of blade showing). Next morning the foot was huge and the pain was awful. Daddy took me to the doctor, who did surgery in his office as Daddy watched. My anesthesia? Chewing gum. A rare treat in those days, and tasting so good it did the trick. Still have that scar on the top of my foot.
The scar in my mind is the memory of how bad my fingers hurt when a live firecracker went off in my hand at age 5. I learned my lesson. I’ll never forget the throbbing. Haven’t liked firecrackers since.
A popular song today is, “I will survive.” I did survive. But how would you have liked raising a kid like me, who chopped the window sill with a butcher knife, and stuck metal objects into the electric socket? Not to mention burning up the car and nearly burning down the house. I would have fit well into Bill Cosby’s comedy routine, in which he asks his child, “Why did you do that?” and he replies with rolling eyes, slurring his words, “I don’t know.”