Scratching The Surface

Greg is the first person to submit his own story in his own words. He is a talented poet, teacher, and senior editor of Blackbird. He also knows of the some of the best swimming holes to be found in Virginia!

“When I was a small boy I lived in the big city of St. Louis, not far from the shadows of the Anheuser Busch brewery where my father worked as an office boy, delivering mail and running errands. It was the 1950’s, my parents were young and poor, and we lived in a one-bedroom shotgun apartment on a street lined with tall, white-trunked sycamores, still one of my favorite trees. I slept on a small bed that was tucked into the area beneath the stairs leading up to the apartment on the second floor. Like Harry Potter, yeah—him with his famous scar.

One day when I was almost five years old (and pretending to be older), I was out playing with some of my scruffy friends—they were old enough to be in kindergarten and first grade—and we took our usual shortcut through a vacant lot down at the end of our block, a quick way to get to the back alley. Someone had been burning tree limbs and leaves there among the patchy grass and rocky dirt, and had piled it all right on the path that we always took at a run through that lot. That day we paused to look at the ashes and a few still-unburned limbs and logs that were lying there, grey and strange, poking around in them, not realizing that those ashes were concealing still-live embers of the fire. I was a curious and tough little boy, always getting into everything, always wearing out the seat of my pants playing and sliding around on the concrete and in the dirt. As I stood there looking at the ashes, the pants leg of my brand-new Sears Roebuck heavy-duty jeans, which I was wearing for the very first time, caught on fire. Later, my parents would carefully school me in the idea of dropping and rolling to put out such a fire, but at that time I didn’t know what else to do other than what I did, which was to run, screaming that I was on fire. Running with your clothes on fire—the worst thing you can do.

I’ll pause here to say that, even though I was unaware of it at that time, I was an adopted child, and this story may perhaps answer some questions some of you may have about that—or about what it means to be a mother. My mother, an attractive young blond-haired woman named Barbara, the woman who had adopted me, was in the kitchen, ironing in the summer heat with the back door open. When she heard my screams from nearly a block away, she tore out the back door, ran up some stairs to the back yard, leapt over the back fence and came running down the alley towards me. When she saw my pants leg on fire, she took hold of the jeans at my waist and in a single powerful motion she ripped those jeans right off my body and tossed them aside, like some sort of superhero. She grabbed me up in her arms and carried me up the street in my underwear, and both of us remembered later that one of the neighbor women was standing there looking over the back fence, clucking her tongue at a boy appearing in the alley in such a state of undress. My mother took me home and bandaged my badly burned leg, asking me the whole time, what did I think I was doing, walking through the live embers of a still-burning fire? Later, when she pulled the bandage away, it came off with a big chunk of flesh, shocking us both. That area on my leg still has no feeling whatsoever today.

Back in those days before DNA identification, an important way to identify criminals and missing persons (and lost boys) were “identifying marks”—and one of mine is that scar on my leg. If I’m ever in a plane crash or train wreck, that’s one way my body could be identified, and I used to think about that some times. Even now, when I run my fingers over the scar that has no feeling, now with both of my parents dead and gone, I think about all that it tells me about myself, and I’m glad to have it, a mark of identity.