Scars
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Meaning. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
Probably my oldest exigent scar is near the crown of my head, from a time in second grade when I was sitting at recess, in a white sweatshirt, on a metal pipe that served as a crude railing around the center courtyard of my aging elementary school. I lost my grip (an enduring talent) on the pipe and rotated backwards, my head smacking down against a concrete curb. By the time I got to the InstaCare, that sweatshirt was red.
I say that scar is probably the oldest because some other, older prospects have faded, or were never as visible to begin with: the tongue I bit through when I was a toddler, or another head wound from the mahogany-frame couch that sat at the bottom of my cousins’ staircase. An early habit of playing with extension cords left no physical remnant, but for years touching one in a dream would wake me instantly.
My biggest scar is the one on the side of my left thigh, from the inauguration of my Calamity Twenties, a femur break from a rather tame wheel-sliding incident on my bicycle in a parking lot next to the ocean, which had to be fixed with surgery. It’s not a part of my body that I see directly very much, but when I do catch sight of it I’m still taken aback—at the latent weakness that showed itself in my body just as I was starting to uncover its strength; at the brute-force temerity of whoever decided you could reduce an ill-placed fracture by cutting someone open and screwing the bones together.
My new scars are still forming, one on the base of my palm over the carpal tunnel, one over the outer end of my radius, the inward of the two forearm bones. That one extends a couple of inches up from the wrist, and last time I saw it the effect was Frankensteinian: purple, bulbous, sewed. Now it’s under a thin layer of medical tape, strapped down under the splint I wear most of the time. In five weeks, the splint will be just gone when I teach my Thursday-night yoga class, raising that scar overhead in urdhva hastasana, flashing it out in mountain pose like a credential.
And that is one thing that a scar is—a credential. From Oxford Languages: “a qualification, achievement, personal quality, or aspect of a person's background, typically when used to indicate that they are suitable for something.” I don’t argue that an injury or its effects are an achievement, at least compared to avoiding the injury. But as an aspect of background, they’re cardinal, especially in so obvious a place as the wrist and the hand. These scars are now a piece of my first impression.
But “suitable for something.” I’m not sure about that part. Not suitable for a display of skeletal integrity; not suitable for giving tips on how to hold on tight. Still suitable for listening to at the piano, I hope. Suitable for typing out a book you’d want to read. Am I suitable for completing an Ironman triathlon? Am I suitable to exemplify how the accretion of life’s hard lessons leads to an exquisite balance of prudence and bravery? You can’t know at first how a scar will turn out. Someday you look down and it’s been there forever.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.