Dear Daughters, 

I have a three-inch scar on my left shin that looks a little bit like a worm. It’s less visible now than it once was, camouflaged in a jungle of thick blond leg hair, freckles, and increasingly wrinkled skin. But it’s still unsightly enough if you happen to study my shins (which I wouldn’t recommend). 

The scar has been with me, literally, for as long as I can remember. And somehow that seems fitting: my earliest memory left a visible scar.

It was the fall of 1975, and my older brother, Tim, had started playing soccer for the Annandale Boys Club. My father had taken me along to watch a game on the field behind Ravensworth Elementary School, where I would spend a fair part of my childhood. We had walked the half mile from our house together.

I don’t remember the game, but it’s safe to assume total chaos. Picture 22 six-year-olds rampaging mob-like across a field of crab grass in pursuit of a white-and-black ball that none of them could remotely control. And picture their parents shouting encouragement and instruction from the sidelines, even though most of them had never seen a proper soccer match in their lives.

“Get it, Georgie!”

“Kick it again, Johnny!”

“Don’t let him push you, Tommy!”

Meanwhile, just a little ways from the field, picture a tow-headed four-year-old boy playing on an old-school American playground. Its monkey bars, slides, and geodesic climbing dome are all made of metal, painted warship grey and firmly planted in a field of middle-weight gravel.

That little boy, of course, is me.

Notably, no one is watching me closely. No one feels a need. The neighborhood is known to be safe. And I’ve been told not to wander off by my father, who is nearby watching the soccer game—though, knowing him, not shouting any instructions from the sidelines himself.

At some point, I decide to climb to the top of a small hill that separates the back of the brick schoolhouse from the field and playground below. We use the hill for sledding in winter, but this morning it’s covered with dew-dampened grass.

Feeling bold, I charge headlong down the hill, then drop to my knees to slide through the grass. It’s a move seemingly designed to tattoo permanent grass stains onto my jeans. And so, as a four-year-old boy, it makes me giddy.

I’m smiling, sliding, laughing, gliding—until something abruptly cuts through my jeans and into my shin. A broken beer bottle has been lying in wait for me, craftily camouflaged beneath the dew-dampened blades.

I don’t remember the moment of the cut or what I did right after it happened. For that matter, I don’t clearly remember anything I’ve written so far, though it must have happened mostly as I’ve described it.

What I do remember clearly is my father scooping me up and carrying me home in his arms. With my legs dangling over one of his forearms, and my head cradled into the other, he told me everything would be all right, and I believed him.

Oddly enough, I remember being basically at peace. I knew bleeding so much wasn’t good, but my biggest concern was my pants. Grass stains on my jeans were bad enough, but cuts and blood were next level. I had inadvertently added injury to insult. My mother, I feared, would be furious.

Officially, my parents ran our household in partnership. In fact, my mom was in charge. As a petite 22-year-old, she had traveled from her home in the hills of West Virginia to work as a nurse in the mental ward of a Washington, DC hospital. Neither nasty cuts nor sometimes naughty boys were any match for her.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t home when we got back. So dad plopped me in the back seat of our gold-and-white Chevy Nova and drove me to the doctor’s office. Not the hospital, mind you, but the office of our local pediatrician, Dr. Handfling, who met us there on a Saturday morning. (Times have changed in the world of healthcare.)

Dr. Handfling reminded me of Andy Griffith, the sheriff of Mayberry I saw on TV, who may have been nothing like the actual Andy Griffith (I wouldn’t know). Dr. Handfling was calm and cool and seemed possessed of deep knowledge and wisdom. His vibe was somehow earthy, human, and scientific all at once.

After cleaning up my shin, he shrugged. “We should probably close this up with some stitches,” he said. “But I suppose we could also just butterfly it, assuming you don’t mind a scar on his shin.”

Immediately, I began begging my father not to let them stitch me. I even started crying, for the first time since the hillside behind the school. My leg hardly hurt at all. But even the idea of Dr. Handfling running a needle and thread through the edges of my open wound sent chills down my spine. 

Besides, as I told my father, I didn’t mind the idea of a scar. Scars look tough. Even at four, I knew this. And I knew boys were supposed to be tough. I didn’t yet recognize the irony of crying to avoid stitches in a bid to look “tough.”

Anyway, my father let me choose. No stitches. Only a permanent scar that still looks like a worm on my shin. A lingering mark that triggers an original memory—of being scooped up and carried away in a moment of need, of having my feelings heard and considered, and of being allowed to make a choice. Even, perhaps, a wrong one.

My mother was annoyed with my father for not getting the stitches. She would have seen that wound properly closed, sealed off and minimized despite my silly fears of a sterilized needle and thread. And she would have been entirely right, from a certain perspective at least. 

As it was, I survived just fine. And to this day, I’m fine with the tradeoff. The scar still looks kind of tough, even wrinkled. More importantly, I’ve lived my entire life without a doubt about how much my father loved me. The scar, to me, is evidence of that and little else.

Some 50 years after the fact, I told this story at his funeral. The congregation nodded and laughed, recognizing the man at its center. A man who was mostly quiet but who carried his friends and family through moments of crisis. A man who was guided by his love more than his fear.

A scar that looks like a worm is a very small price to pay for what I got from him, on that day and many before and after.  

I miss him, and I hope to measure up to his example. Not because he was perfect (no one is or can hope to be). Because even when he was wrong he started with love.

This is always the right place to start. As I do in my letters to you.

Love, 

Dad