This is Me
On the ring finger of my right hand, starting at the inside and just below the crease of the middle joint of my ring finger is the beginnings of a scar. It cuts across the middle crease on the inside of the finger and continues on around to the top joint on the back of my hand. I got the scar in 1965 when my high school ring caught on the edge of a backboard, I was slapping it on my way down from making a layup. It nearly pulled my finger off.
I still have the ring they cut off, and I still have the scar, but the scar is dim with age. You have to know where to look to find it, and I hardly ever think about it anymore, which I suppose is a tribute to time and all the things I’ve done with that hand and that finger. Held my wife’s hand as we rode in the car, held my children’s hands, played a guitar, weeded gardens, built fences, tapped out a tune, washed dishes, cooked a meal, and yesterday I painted it and made a print on a rock.
The latter was done in a gathering of friends who were all doing roughly the same thing, painting hands, crosses, swirls, you name it, on rocks, cloth, pants, and shirts. Several singers even offered up tunes for the crowds’ enjoyment. There was food, and drink, laughter, and loving touches. And in the middle of it all, I knew this gathering of friends and others to come was how the scar of a psychic wound, the loss of a wife, would begin to soften and blend into the soul. There, if you knew where to look, but no longer an impediment. Instead, it would be something to catch the paint and say, this is me and how I’ve lived.
John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver’s Tale