Battle scars

My son hobbled into the house after a weekend at a friend’s cottage, wounded by a minor spill he took on a dirt bike when he rounded a corner on an unfamiliar country road. In trying to avoid a trio of kids, who were walking side-by-side and took up the width of the roadway blocking his way, he crashed.

When he was telling me the story, I said a silent prayer.

The Kid came out of the resulting crash with a few bruises and a nice case of road rash on his one elbow and one knee.

At home the next day, as I rubbed antibacterial salve on the abrasions, he told me that when he looked at the blood on the rocks he was landed on, he thought to himself, “Geez, I hope that’s not mine.”

It was.

The Kid wanted a “really nice scar” once the scabs healed; he wanted something to show for his injury, something similar to the five-inch scar I have on my right thigh, just above the knee.

I was 11-years-old, about the same age as my son was when he wiped out, when my mom escorted me through the Emergency Room doors with a mean-looking gash that took 17 stitches to close after a hunk of metal sliced my leg open while I was tubing down the river that ran behind our house.

The Kid has heard this story many times because nearly every summer my long, thick scar, although faded, still gathers attention.

Without a scar of his own, the kid will have to work up a story about his narrow escape and how he heroically skidded a motorbike into a ditch in order to save others from injury. He will need physical proof to give the story some weight.

I tell him that I am sure he’ll have many more injuries and just as many stories to tell, but just in case he doesn’t, I take a couple of photos to preserve the memory.