Scar Tissue, Mr Know-It-All

Not long ago we were at an extremely busy water park. The crowd was large, the lazy river
packed enough to deny much relaxation. Walking through the crowd I noticed a couple of people
looking at me. Looking at my belly.

Well, it is a nice belly, not large enough to hold a drink as I sit but still yet a good
flotation device. I sat down without thinking much about it. And then it clicked.
My Scar.

Ah yes, the scar. That's what they were looking at.
As a metal barrel was filling with thousands of gallons of water somewhere above and away from
where I sat and the background din of water and children merged into a cacophony, I went
back...

Sixteen years old. Full of self-awareness, clueless of everything, possessor of knowledge
unfounded, ungrounded but quite sure of himself. I was a punk.
I had stolen a fifth of some nasty alcohol from my father's stash of long-forgotten gifts he
kept put away in the basement. My nephew was staying the night, he was only twelve. There
was a dance at the school that evening. It was Halloween.

We drank. We drank a lot. There were a few of us. We stumbled from a friend's house and
went out into the night. At the end of our wandering we showed up at the school. The dance
was on. We were not going in. We hovered outside the fringes of the outside lights. We
made comments from the shadows and smoked our cigarettes.

Fuzzy. Hazy. There is a crowd outside the back of the school. I don't know if we led them
out or a separate gathering had already been there. Teenage kids. Someone spoke wrong,
someone looked wrong. I know I was talking to a few girls when I heard a yell that a kid
had been picking on my nephew. Someone shouted he had a knife. In my stumbling over I saw
nothing in his hands.

One, two, three punches to the face. His only reaction was a thrust in my direction. I
felt it. Through the alcohol I felt the pressure, the release, the blood.
Time to go home. That was my thought, that was my instinct. Go home and sleep it off. My
nephew and I wandered off with a friend towards home. I made it across a busy street and we
cut off through a weedy dead-end that would take me about three blocks from home. That
would be as close as I made it.

In the dark I needed to pee. They stepped away as I went. I still felt the need to go but
I could hear pee hitting the ground. It wasn't. It was blood. Blood running out of my
body, over my hands into the dirt below. Get home.

I made it out of the weeds, into the street. I made it to the curb and fell down. My
friend and nephew went running for help. I could hear a couple on their porch not far away.
They didn't believe them, it was a Halloween trick. They got their treat when they came
over and I raised my shirt to show them.

Lights. Sounds. Ambulance. A suction device stuck down and jabbed around the inside of my
throat to vacuum up the vomit. Lights above me. Count backwards.

Woke up. Blurry. Father holding my hand. Trading squeezes, couldn't speak around the tube
that ran up my nose, down my throat. Awake again. Tubes. Eight separate tubes coming out
of a hole in my stomach, pulling black fluid into a drip-bag. A long gauze running across
my stomach. Tubes up the nose. No water. No Food.

Eleven days I was in the hospital. They said I was an inch from wearing a colostomy bag.
And in those days, I still had not felt my mortality. I learned a new respect for life and
all its intricacies. But I was still immortal. My proof? I had lived.

It's the sickness later on in life that wears you down and makes you feel it. When the cogs
skip a beat, when you need a check under the hood. That's when you wonder about it. When
you think about it. And it is usually during a time in life when you have the most to lose
and will hurt the largest group of loving individuals that rely on you, depend on you, want
to keep you around for a long long time.

As I said in a previous post, I have felt memories swimming to the surface lately. Memories
that might be distorted by time or affected by my own shoddy thinking. And I sat by the
poolside, the clanging of the bell warning me that the steel barrel had filled would soon be
gushing those thousands of gallons of water down on a group of expectant children.

My scars. I have two from the stabbing. One is what we call my second belly button. A
puckered dent that does look like it is imitating the original. Maybe it is, maybe that was
my second chance at life. I was handed another umbilical in order to save my life.

The other scar is a nasty cut that runs along my abdomen. When I was stabbed the knife
punctured my stomach. Earlier that evening we had raided a Pizza Hut's salad bar where I
had fed on handfuls of sunflower seeds. The seeds spilled out. Surgeons told me it took
three hours to hunt down everything that had escaped into the cavity of my abdomen.

And I know why that second scar is so wicked. I had heard grumblings from the doctors
during my long stay at the hospital. They had been breathing the alcohol that was in my
system that three hours that they were saving my life. Imagine the smell of blood and
alcohol raking at your face while you sweated to save some stupid kid's life. What better
way to remind him than to leave a nasty scar in its wake. I've been told that plastic
surgery could help to a small extent but the scarring is so rough, it was stitched badly
with bumps and puckers and runs about right across my front for about 12 inches. A long
line and two holes below, nearly an inverted smiley face.

It's a good thing to show. It reminds the ones that know the story of what can happen in an
instant, what can happen through bad choices, through alcohol, through stupid youth --
choose from the long list of my mistakes. It reminds the children that even if you make
mistakes you can get through them, make yourself better, still be a decent person. And if
someone doesn't know the story, let them step up and ask. I'll tell them.

Scar tissue is only tissue, but the underlying lesson,.. that is what you carry with you, that is the weight that cannot be seen but should be shared.