I have a lot of scars. There's a big one on my forehead from when I fell down the stairs at a shopping mall. This happened when I was three years old, but I will carry the evidence on my forehead for the rest of my life.
When I was four, I lost control of my tricycle while riding down an alley, and crashed face-first into a trailer hitch. It was a very bloody affair, but somehow left no scar. Sometimes really big accidents turn out to be less significant than the tiny cuts we don't think much of at the time.
There is a little scar on my shoulder from the day I carelessly walked into a sharp tree-branch while mowing the lawn. It didn't hurt much, but that scar is still there to remind me to be more careful when I do yard work.
When I played youth baseball there was an old wooden bat we would swing to loosen up. Someone hollowed out the barrel and drove a railroad spike into it to weigh it down. It was an accident waiting to happen.
I can't easily hide these scars, so people often ask me about them. They want to know what happened and if it hurt. I can hide my psychological scars, so people don't ask about them very often.
Some people have physical scars and psychological scars that go together, like burned flesh after an attempted arson murder or big stretch marks from having two fatherless children.
Our scars are like a stack of bills for things we bought many years ago. We don't want those things anymore, but we have to keep making payments. We try to learn from our scars, but we always end up getting more.
I like to think our psychological wounds will be visible after we die, like the rings inside a tree. People will stand over my corpse some day and say, "Ah, see here? That must be from when his wife left him for the third time. And look at this one ... seems to be from about 1986. Isn't that when his father was hit by a car?"
Paul Lundgren is a newspaper columnist and a very nice man. His e-mail address is paul [at] geekprom.com.
