At a University of Alabama student art show 30 years ago, we bought a large woodcut that we have carried it with us to our assorted dwellings and offices ever since. A bold-stroke inked carving of a man s face, in wide black lines, much in the style of Ben Shawn, its title is The Scars A Man Wears . Life does leave its scars on all of us. Living is scarring. Time notches us with scars like a farmer notches a stick.
Some scars are physical.
Often they are reminders of events and people and places we don t want to forget, notes left by time upon our bodies. One of my buttocks bears scars from sitting on a charcoal bucket at my grandmother s home when I was two and fell off a goat cart. I pulled off the stove while jumping rope when I was four. My playmate, Clark, visiting his grandfather Methodist district superintendent up the street, and I had skipped Sunday School to run around barefooted, and I paid the price for that iniquity. Mrs. Walter Herndon, one of the few neighbors who owned a car, took me to the hospital, and Dr. Arthur Dunlap, scheduled to leave for World War II duty that afternoon, left his family in church to come sew me up.