A scarred cork board and battered digits

This week has come to the end. Weekend. Two weeks from now, we will be preparing for a final (?) ride to Clinton, South Carolina for Kate's graduation from Presbyterian College. From there, where will she go? All of the nostalgia begins to waft over me like an unexpected cool breeze in July. Such a deceptive and alluring danger.

It would be nice if I could focus on the beauty and comfort to be found in the present. But having achieved my fifty first year on this planet, I know that the beauty and comfort to be found in the present is fleeting, and possibly reserved for the twenty year old of today who is enjoying college, running around to the calling of his heart. Thirty years from now, he will sit in his chair and ponder the lost adventures of 2008 and forget the silly heartaches and shocks that meant so much then, but are meaningless to a fifty year old.

If the person is lucky.

On the other hand, there are traumas which hit us like a nail to our forehead, which come and go and bend us to their brute pounding and affect our comings and goings in ways which are almost unseen until the damage is already done.

Sometimes our friends, if they are close, can see the damage before we can. Sometimes, we can find ourselves in conversation with a close friend, who sheepishly offers a piece of advice, to warn us of the damage they see. Most times we avoid the advice, because we know our situation so much better. And if we are young, we are inscrutable, omniscient, unbeatable. It is so rare to find yourself in a position in which you listen and learn before its too late.

But you need the nail holes in your forehead. We don't learn without the nail holes. Nothing sticks.

There is a cork board. When it is placed on the wall, the cork is unblemished, pristine. Beautiful, in its corky way.

But the cork is meaningless unless we attach something on the surface. A picture. A list. A message. A remembrance. In order to give it meaning, we have to place tacks in its skin. We have to cut its flesh with the nail holes which give it significance.

Until its tack-scarred flesh is so covered with holes, that it can no longer receive the tacks which attach its meaning. The flesh fails and we find ourselves placing the cork board in a can at the end of the driveway.

And finding a new cork board.

When I was about ten years old, I visited an alligator farm in Florida. Inside one of the pens was a huge alligator of significant years. The attendant informed us that this alligator was many years old. The interesting thing to the attendant was the fact that the alligator had managed to retain all of his toes through his many years. Apparently, it was very unusual for a male alligator to retain all of the toes on his feet through the many years of struggle.

I guess the question I have is this: Was the alligator so big and bad that he had managed to retain all of his digits against the struggles he had suffered throughout the years or was this alligator so meek that he had managed to avoid the struggles?

When I look down at my own fingers, the first thing I see is a scar on the middle finger of my left hand. The nail on this finger is broken and remains broken to this day. The scar is left from a time when I was a toddler and closed a folding chair on my hand, pinching the flesh on my finger and forever damaging the seedbed of the nail which grows on that finger. On the finger to its right is a straight line of scarring where I cut my finger on a broken lightbulb in my room when I was seventeen. I sprayed blood all over the wall. Against my middle finger is a small scar from a bout of chicken pox when I was six or seven. And finally, if I remove the ring from my ring finger on my left hand I will find the mark of said ring, where the gold band has pressed against the finger for almost twenty five years.

I guess I am like most alligators of my age. What lessons have I learned from my scars?