Scars
It seems as if the American Cancer Society can’t live without phoning me each morning at an hour that is closer to military reveille than to normal human time. They’re after my money, even though I just gave.
The reason, of course, is that I’ve just had a small surgical procedure to remove an item caused by sunlight, and therefore the ACS reckon this will be something that is on my mind. And it is. The scar is healing up neatly, and looks rather undramatic. At first it seemed huge, with its bits of thread sticking out, and I joked that it would be like the dueling scars Heidelberg students were so proud of in the 1920s. Some would go so far as to inflict their own scars with a straight edge razor and claim they were badges of Honor inflicted by an epee or saber. These were the things I saw in my youth. Now the age has changed and those erstwhile young tearaways are all dead of old age.
Being cut into is nothing new. Being gently sliced open to have piece of malignancy removed leaves one feeling that, one way and another, one has parted with one of one’s nine lives, or that a series of doors somewhere have just been closed, permanently.
It is also a reminder. We only get a short amount of time here. My Hollywood career was never likely to be very promising, but now it seems even less possible than before. I leave it, or even the ghost of its possibility, in the ashes. No one comments on the scar. Either its too small or they’re all too polite, or possibly my complexion was never that good to begin with. But I’ve heard the bell tolling, and I’m grateful for modern medicine, for my health insurance, and for the reminder about this body I’m in.
I look at the young people at the Mall with their piercings and tattoos, and think of my own marked flesh.
Time waits for no one. Use it as best you can.
