Just got some photos from my sister-in-law of their son. He is a cute kid. One of the pictures was of him eating what looks like a vanilla waffer, one of your great kid foods if there ever was one. In his little hand, he holds a partially eaten cookie, the lightly baked crispy crust which has turned into a mush, now covers his face and hands. It’s a site that you can’t help but smile.
For some reason, I looked close at his hands. Small, delicate, unblemished–then I looked at my own. I don’t have bad hands, but they have aged. There are the big scars like the one on my middle finger on my left hand that needed stitches. I got that when I was young, too young for me to even remember. My sister closed a door on my hand and broke it open. Only recently I learned that apparently I asked my sister to do it. You have to admire my curiousity bursting out so young.
Other scars on my hands are smaller, subtle. Most of them don’t even have even interesting stories to go with them. There’s a small scar on the top of my right hand that I got when I was reaching for something in my car underneath the seat and it scraped the top of my hand. I thought it would just go away, but it left a mark. There are those that I don’t even remember getting, especially those on my knuckles.
In a way, those scars are as much of my life as anything else. I look at Quinn, my nephew, and see that he has virtually no marks and as he gets older, he’ll get them, much like everyone else. Each of those marks, those scars, will have their own story, their own experience or life. Each of them will be an individual mark of something that happened.
At first I felt bad about how my hands looked, about how old I seemed. But a quick reflection and I realize that it’s nothing more than the life I’ve lived and the scars are just reminders of time passing and leaving the occasional mark.
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