Few moments of my life have taught me so much about America as the time my friend Franklin stabbed me with a pencil in 9th grade. This was in Ancient History class, where instead of listening to Mr. Dripps (his actual name) explain about the Hittites, I was doing an “imitation imitation” – you know, like an impression of Carol Channing imitating Jimmy Stewart.
I think I was doing Abe Lincoln imitating Mary Tyler Moore, in fact, when Franklin, exasperated, wheeled around from the seat in front of me, jabbed his pencil into my calf and shouted, “Why can’t you just be yourself and shut up?”
It was a good question.
I still have the mark on my leg 50 years later. Apparently graphite pencil scars very frequently turn out to be permanent.
This is not the only scar on my body; at my age – a well-moisturized 62 – I’ve got lots of little dents and bumps to remind me of misadventures past. Each of these scars tells a story, most of them ending happily enough, and not least because, you know, they healed.
Then there are the scars you can’t see, the ones sustained in memory, like the details of my son Sean’s difficult first weeks of life in an infant intensive care unit as doctors worked on his tiny heart. He’s 24 now, and of course remembers nothing of this.
But I remember every second.
These are the things I think about in the middle of the night, waking from some unquiet dream. I imagine everybody has wounds like that; sometimes, the longer ago they happened, the more they hurt.
Injuries to the body heal themselves with time, if you’re lucky. But injuries to the soul are harder.
Finding a way through trauma, of course, is at the heart of therapy, and there are a number of paths people tread in order to find their peace, including the telling of
stories. Seeing a troubled life as a drama, a series of conflicts that, with luck, lead to resolution is one of the ways we reach a state of hard-won grace as we age.
Countries invent stories and myth in order to make sense of trauma, too. One reason the scars of the Civil War have never fully healed is that we’ve never, as a nation, agreed on a single narrative about what it was all for.
Now we are engaged in a great debate about the lessons and meaning of the Trump era. To progressives like me, the past four years have been a period of mendacity, incompetence, racism and – in the end – insurrection. The wounds are fresh.
When I saw Joe Biden and Kamala Harris sworn in, I felt, briefly, as if all the injuries of the past four years might, with time, recede. As Michael Gerber, editor of American Bystander, so poignantly noted on the day of the inauguration, “As a person with a disability, it’s just nice to have a president who won’t make fun of me.”
Disabled people aren’t the only ones who will bear the lingering scars of the Trump era. As an L.G.B.T.Q. American, I’ve spent the past four years fearing that every new day will bring some new indignation – like Ben Carson calling women like me “big hairy men,” or the time the administration considered erasing transgender individuals as a legal entity altogether. Or simply the policy enacted as Mr. Trump was on his way out the door, wiping out nondiscrimination protections for queer Americans.
Now we’re on Month 1 of the Biden/Harris years, and for many progressives, it’s with a hearty sigh of relief. I wept at the inauguration; I actually stood up for the Pledge of Allegiance and sang along with the national anthem. Nonetheless, the scars of the Trump years are likely to endure. A new era, alas, doesn’t mean that the last one didn’t happen. I learned in the most personal way imaginable that one’s country can suddenly turn on you, that the progress that you think is being made can be wiped out in an instant.
Which raises the question: How can time heal our wounds when the underlying diseases – racism, xenophobia, hatreds of every stripe – continue to flourish and thrive? How can we ever get past Donald Trump, when so many people seem unwilling to let him go?
What do we learn from our scars? Are they just a reminder of the traumas we’ve experienced, things that remind us how easily wounded we really are? Or are we to look upon our dents and marks with wisdom, and understand these wounds really did heal with time – that the pain that once defined our lives will not last forever?
Franklin and I, for our part, have found common ground after 50 years. (We never did stop being friends.) He allows it was wrong to stab me with his pencil, and I admit that there are times when I can be more than a little annoying. In hindsight, he was not wrong when he urged me to “just be yourself and shut up.”
But the idea behind an imitation imitation was not unsound, either. After all, what else was I trying to do, in my awkward teenage way, besides bringing together two things that you wouldn’t normally think of as being in harmony and finding a new story in that union?
As Mary Tyler Moore imitating Abe Lincoln might have said: “Oh, Mr. Grant. Let us strive on to finish the work we are in and to bind up the nation’s wounds.”
Courtesy: The New York Times
