Two summers ago Julie and I were hiking with friends when my shoelace caught on a log and I tripped. By itself, this wouldn’t have been much of an accident, but I was wearing a backpack, and had my hands hooked into its shoulder straps, and I wasn’t able to get my hands out to break my fall. Again, not much of an accident, except that I was crossing a bog on the edge of a small lake, and it was full of wet and rotting avalanche debris.

My forehead hit first, striking a broken-off branch protruding from a half-buried log. An inch lower and an inch to the side and I would have lost an eye, but instead I ended up with a bruised skull and a serious laceration at the location of my 6th chakra, the spot where bindis go on the foreheads of female Hindus.

I was a bit shocky, but Julie got me to dry ground, retrieved the first aid kit from my pack, and stopped the bleeding. She applied a compress to the wound, wrapped an ace bandage around my head to hold it in place, and got me started on the miles-long trek back to our car.

I looked worse than I felt, mainly because head wounds bleed profusely and between the blood and the mud I looked like the victim of a grizzly attack. I spooked a few hikers when I passed them on the trail, a bloody specter, moving fast, staggering a bit, mute and wild-eyed.

I doubt that I changed anyone’s camping plans, but I imagine their tents that night moved from the cozy to the flimsy end of the Tent Comfort Spectrum.

Once home, it took Julie a couple of hours to clean me up. She tweezed a teaspoon of rotten wood from where it had embedded itself under my skin. I didn’t have a concussion, but the shock had worn off and I was hurting and exhausted. I was asleep the minute I hit the bed.

________

The wound took a month to heal, and it left the white spiderweb of a scar. It quit being something people noticed after a year, but my surgery last fall left a bigger scar on my cheek and official instructions to care for it. I began applying a silicone treatment to both scars.

The scar on my forehead began to change. It raised up a bit in the center, darkened, and started to hurt when I pressed on it. It was not a reassuring development, given my recent experience with melanoma. I poked at the scar, picked at it, kept applying silicone to it, and finally, when the raised area had developed a small rough scab, I took the scab off, in defiance of official scar-care procedure.

Beneath the scab was a piece of black rotten wood the size of a rice grain. I pulled it out with my fingernails. It took some days for the hole it left to heal.

In most lights, my facial scars are now invisible. But I’ve been thinking about that speck of wood I packed around for two years. Underneath the mark on my forehead was a genuine piece of avalanche-killed limber pine. It allowed me to join those humans who have carried the external world—shrapnel, bullets, stainless steel screws, titanium and ceramic hips, pacemakers, swallowed toys, false teeth, squeezy implants of a dozen different types—around in their bodies. If you’re lucky, you forget the boundaries of your body have been violated and go about your business, and the truth comes out only in the forever chemicals emitted by the crematorium chimney.

If you’re a different kind of lucky, they show up as part of the healing process. The body doesn’t like these foreign objects, no matter how benign their purpose. Pulling the final piece of wood out of my forehead was accompanied by a feeling of relief, a release of pressure, a laying down of burden all out of proportion to the amount of material extracted.

________

No one gets to be my age without scars. Not all of them are physical. Carrying a bit of forcibly-injected wood in your forehead is a decent metaphor for long-ago traumas becoming encapsulated and forgotten, at least until healing finally brings them to the surface.

Healing is problematic. If there is such a thing as emotional scar treatment, I don’t think it’s necessarily traditional psychotherapy, or, God forbid, psychoanalysis, both of which run the risk of further trauma. Instead, it’s living in a world where love and forgiveness are not just possibilities but part of existence itself. That existence is itself problematic because what we call self-preservation depends on hate and revenge more than we admit.

A lot of what we cherish as our identity is a list of injustices we won’t forgive, people we despise, and hoarded injuries that we won’t let go of no matter what. These things make us what we are, and to give them up means risking obliteration.

________

One of my uncles on my father’s side was the victim/beneficiary of a full-on, multi-year Freudian psychoanalysis, back when psychoanalysis was cool. He was a doctor who morphed from a family practitioner into a pathologist, a person who could look at a biopsy under a microscope and tell if the person it came from had cancer or not.

He worked during a time when the cancers he diagnosed were death sentences, and I suppose that pathology was, for him, the dark slot at the bottom of his pinball machine of life. Psychoanalysis is supposed to give you more choices in life, but it presumes you exchange the prison you’re born into for a slightly larger one. If you buy into that metaphor, you don’t really get much for all those expensive hours you’ve purchased.

At least my uncle didn’t. He spent years digging up memories he had forgotten, and few of them had been pleasant ones, and he was enraged at his father’s early death, at his mother’s transfer of all her hopes and dreams onto his fragile adolescent shoulders, at his siblings treating him like a child even though he remained a child, and at his living patients who wouldn’t take his advice, forcing him to move on to dead ones.

In late career, my uncle attended a pathology conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. I lived nearby, and he contacted me and invited me to dinner. He chose an expensive restaurant, but I didn’t enjoy the meal because it came with a recital of all his injuries, betrayals, shunnings, injustices, griefs, indecencies, stupidities, and cruelties. None of them were his fault.

Psychoanalysis had allowed him to bring a myriad of dark repressions into consciousness, but once they were there, he hoarded them, treasured them, let them make him into the horrid man he became. He was miserable, vindictive, obsessed, and lonely. If there was one lesson he taught me, it is that we might not have the power to make our life a paradise, but we can certainly make it a living hell.

________

I have been marinating in love and forgiveness for 30 years or so. It’s mostly Julie’s fault, although I try to reciprocate her affections and basic human decencies as much as I can.

I seem to be healing enough to recall things I have long insulated from memory.

Lately I’ve been remembering the faces of colleagues that for years were just blurs in my mind. They belong to people I now recognize as abusive personality types. That doesn’t sound forgiving, and it’s not, but at this late point in my life I’ve been having the occasional revelation: “Hey! That person was abusive! I thought (insert awful life experience HERE) was all my fault.”

It’s now clear to me that these abusers were abused themselves, trapped in a long daisy-chain of evil, and that they compulsively did to other people what had been done to them. That doesn’t mean I’ll ever be able to forgive them for what they did to me, in, say, English Department meetings, but I’m working on it. More to be pitied than scorned, and so on. It helps to visualize their faces and pretend I’m looking in the mirror.

________

Last week I awoke from a nightmare. It manifested as a single image, and was so vivid I awoke blinking and sniffing the air, thinking someone was standing in our bedroom, staring down at me, expressionless.

It was a boy I had gone to grade school with in the 1950s. His family lived in a house that didn’t have winter plumbing, and their kids, scattered throughout the eight grades of the school, usually moved about in a miasma of body odor. Any one of them would eat any part of your hot lunch you refused to eat. They dressed in hand-me-downs, and they never raised their hands in class, and they were never called on by our teachers. The joke was that they took two years to get through every grade. Another joke was that the canned corn that was slopped into a corner of our lunch trays was what had become of their father’s teeth.

They were bullied when there was no one more important to bully, and some students, repeating what parents had said, called them white trash. The father of this sad family was an intermittently employed alcoholic, their mother an obese, beaten woman with dull eyes, who would show up at parent-teacher conferences and hear her children’s teachers out, say nothing, and leave.

I don’t know what happened to any of them. None of them became my friends. I didn’t bully them, having had experience with bullies myself, but I didn’t think about them if I could help it.

Sixty-five years later, one of them was standing by my bed.

Why now? I think that like the piece of wood in my forehead, my memory of that family was encapsuled, hidden away. I know that if I had been one of their bullies, I wouldn’t have been able to approach what I’ve recalled so far. Shame of that intensity creates amnesia. But these days I’m getting old, and ignorance and poverty are losing some of their terror in the face of actuarial tables.

It's hard to think that terror will ever completely go away. In the hierarchy of our community, my family was near the bottom. Prominent citizens looked down on us and no doubt, given the language of the times, called us white trash. (My uncle said that’s what he and my grandmother had been called after my grandfather had died and their savings had vanished into failed banks.)

My father had left home when he was 14. He had gone to work in the mines halfway through his senior year of high school, and although he and my mother were slowly working their way out of poverty, they had both been taken in by other families when their parents couldn’t afford to keep them. We weren’t that far away—in the eyes of our community’s leading citizens—from being as low as the lowest. My own salvation lay in the fact that my parents were sober, hard-working, and loving, but when you’re in grade school, you can have that kind of salvation and still feel that you’re in danger of falling off the edge of the world.

I was horrified by my poor classmate’s presence at my bedside. I could see his colorless eyes, his misshapen face, his dirty clothes, and for a moment I could smell him. I was overcome by nausea and anger and the need to get away from what seemed a contaminating evil. When I threw back the covers, he faded away, but it took more than one cup of coffee to convince me that grade school was long over, I was in a different place, and the cliff-edge of the world was safely distant.

The image was something I’ve been carrying with me for a lifetime. I didn’t even know it was there.

________

This story doesn’t have a moral, save the obvious one that the psyche has its own methods of healing and you shouldn’t try to conduct delicate personal archaeology with the backhoe of psychoanalysis. That, and you shouldn’t call anyone white trash or any of the other dehumanizing epithets we call each other, no matter how much you’ve staked your identity on your capacity to be cruel, or on your presumed skill at avoiding the accidents and blind spots that plague other people.