Reading my body as a living diary

    Have you ever thought about studying your own body to bring back memories? As I get older, I look at my battered body and find that every scar and missing or damaged body part offers a diary about my life.
     For example, the earliest surgery I had in the old hospital in Holyoke (across from the courthouse) was the removal of my tonsils when I was a little boy. Now, I can’t see where the tonsils used to be, but it was at that time that my doctor told my parents that I was allergic to sulfa drugs. Now, every time I respond to a doctor concerning allergies, I say, “sulfa drugs.” Right away, I am taken back to my early childhood and my first surgery (not counting circumcision, which I will not discuss in this column).
     On my left hand, there’s the small scar, wrinkled fingernail, and broken tip of my ring finger, where in grade school, I suffered a soccer injury. Back then, we had a cement area for kicking a rubber ball (not even a real soccer ball) during recess. I dove for the ball one day and someone stepped on my finger and slid across the cement. Getting patched up by the school nurse was not fun at all, but yet another memory.
     I also sport a small scar above one of my eyes, below the eyebrow — now very hard to see as many years have passed. I remember throwing a croquet ball at a tossed up basketball, and the wooden croquet ball came directly back and nearly put out my eye. This happened at the house of one of Holyoke’s doctors, whom I helped move in.
     I also have vivid memories about fainting for five seconds while working at another Holyoke doctor’s office — he allowed me to help stitch up someone’s head, and I ended up on the floor, passed out. Even though there is nothing on my old body to remind me of that, it cost me several years of being able to fly for the Air Force.
     Once, while roller skating in our Bowman Avenue home, I caromed off a basement wall and fell face first on the cement, removing half of one of my two front teeth. For years, I wore a shiny silver cap, looking like some James Bond villain. Years later, I had the ugly cap removed and the half-broken tooth filled with gold, but even that was garish. Finally, about 10 years ago, a dentist capped the tooth with a fake white enamel tooth, making my smile a little bit more bearable. Every time I play my trumpet, I am reminded of these repairs, as I had to adjust my embouchure each time to continue tooting my horn. I do not roller skate anymore, by the way.
     While at Colorado State University, I fell while doing some skateboarding outside the dormitory I lived in — but, since I was on an Air Force ROTC rifle drill team and scheduled to go on a nice team trip to Arizona, I never did have my broken right wrist repaired. To this day, half a century later, it is still unrepaired and hurts every day. Plus, over the years, the arthritis from the broken bones in my wrist have twice caused me to have carpal tunnel surgery, memorialized by small scars on the palm of my right hand. More memories!

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