One of my favorite mental scenes is that of a mother trying to keep her young child from being injured while learning how to ride a bike. The child is in long pants, long sleeves, a helmet, wrist guards, gloves and everything but a facemask. Inevitably, el mocoso falls face first and ends up with a scraped nose and no more bike for two weeks.
Thinking of that scene today, I came up with a mostly-benign history of my blemished, scarred, pock-marked self.
- Two-inch scar on my right pinky from where they put a pin in my finger after I broke it grabbing a groundball with my hand, not my glove while playing softball;
- Half-inch scar on my left index finger from where I ran it across a fence (that had a hidden barbed wire);
- Quarter-inch scar under my right eyebrow, from trying to catch a glass Pepsi bottle before it struck the ground; I missed, it shattered;
- Nickel-sized scar on my right knee, from repeatedly scraping the knee across sidewalks (no more skateboards);
- Three-inch scar on my left shin from shaving accident (note to self–no more cheap razors);
- Three missing front teeth (and you thought they were just perfectly straight teeth) from trying to guard a kid’s forward basketball progress with my face; and
- Most impressively, not a single scar from falling body-first into a gnarly rosebush from an 8-foot high fence.
© Laura Genao 2007
Lo Que Dijeron