Part of it is Hollywood make-up artist perfect: an inch long, barrel-straight, etched on the left hand just above the knuckle of my index finger. On a good day the scar tissue of the holes where the doctor at Womack Army Hospital took the little hook-shaped needle and closed the wound with sutures is clearly visible. It leaves the back of my hand and moves along an imaginary line to the joint of my thumb, this cut a bit more jagged, curving and slicing from the recoil of my hand on the knife blade. It’s 30 years old and will be with me until the end.

My three children have been fascinated by it. At odd times they’ll ask to see it, holding my hand close to their faces, peering while asking questions. I’m purposely evasive most of the time, turning their childlike yet morbid fascination to another subject as quickly as I can.

Until I read the articles in The Sun, I had never thought about the life of scars. They have stories. Whether a reminder of a near-death experience or the result of something as innocent as falling from a tree, there is always a story: a reckless time in one’s youth, self-inflicted while searching for help, an uplifting memory sealed in blood, a work-related incident, the foretelling of a life to be lived on the edge -— or perhaps just a comic moment from a normal day.

There’s one on the chin of my 7-year-old, the middle child. She was showing a friend how she could ride her bicycle to the mailbox, a downhill trek with a high degree of danger at our mountainside home. Her nerve was over the top, her knowledge of working pedal brakes still forming. Over she went, skin on road, chin laid open. She will try and prove herself again, probably throughout her life, and I only hope I can be there to catch her.

My friend Stevie Odom was making real time with girls when the rest of us were too clumsy to do more than talk about it. This was when we were in the seventh grade at Pine Forest Middle School in Cumberland County. Sitting at lab tables in Mrs. Haley’s seventh-period science class, moments before the final bell, he asked me to use the thumb and forefinger of both my hands to pull up the loose skin on his wrist. Holding a regular sewing needle, he pushed it through while I held his tanned, rough hide, skin already hardened by years in the tobacco field. I remember the sound of piercing flesh, his smile behind teary eyes, and the tiny circles of scar tissue he had on both wrists. He was old beyond his years, and dropped out before we made it to high school. I hear from neighborhood friends he’s still around, married, with kids.

One scar brings back jitters mixed with pure joy. Kerry and I, still in high school, would take his father’s truck and chainsaw to gather firewood from whoever’s property we could get permission to cut on. Fall and winter days, strong and flush with energy, we would work for hours, making a contest of splitting the seasoned wood back at his parent’s house. One day though, rushing and inexperienced, the chainsaw jumped wildly out of the tree and the chain tore into Kerry’s thigh before it stopped circling the blade. The gash was ugly, bloody but not serious. He tied it off with a bandana, then sat in the truck and drank a Mountain Dew before we started back to work. The long, deep scar is still there, and we go quickly back to those days whenever one of us points it out.

Then there were the shooters, not everyday junkies but guys who loved to occasionally use needles to get high. That summer I lived in Louisiana working for a geophysical crew whose job it was to look for oil and natural gas in the bayous. A book of memories was made that summer, among them the lessons from these co-workers who made fun of us college guys. We would sit around at nights in our kitchenettes, slugging Dixie beer and listening to cassette tapes on the early versions of what came to be known as ghetto blasters. Bored after 10 or 12 straight days working, holed up in a cheap motel, pockets full of good money, their friend would arrive with the speed, MDA or some other little-known, regional drug. They would go through the whole process of spooning it out, adding a few drops of water, cooking it with a bic lighter, drawing it up into the syringe and then shooting. I remember how quickly the high hit them, their heads rolling back and a smile spread across their face, others tripping over their feet trying to get to the toilet before puking. Their arms bore the marks, the gnarled knobs of scar tissue they never tried to hide.

Scars, it seems, are almost always meaningful, the imperfect skin symbolic of what’s beneath it, telling little of its story on first glance. Many of them, it seems, are about people’s attempts to go for it, to feel the rush of some kind of danger amid an otherwise normal existence.

The story of my own little scar is at least important to me. It’s family history, part of the story of a divorced and recently-remarried mother away working when her teen-age boys came home from school. The stepfather, only a bad joke at the time, turned into a nightmare a year or two later. I can’t tell you now where he was all the time. The father, of course, was away, unable to make a difference.

That’s the serious part. The incident itself is not so daring. That day after school while my brother and I made sandwiches, the argument was over the jar of mustard; he wanted it, I had it. The ancient family butcher knife he held was originally intended to spread French’s on white bread, but in a fit of anger he whacked me, the jar fell, and glass and mustard exploded across the linoleum floor. I was cursing wildly while trying to keep fresh blood from joining the yellow mustard mess. According to family lore, Steve, somewhat composed now, a bit upset at me for spoiling his after-school snack, shouted something like “That’ll teach you to keep the mustard when I want it.”

And it did. My evasiveness with my children about the mark on my hand will continue, but their fascination reveals a truth: scars do have stories.

(Scott McLeod can be reached at info@smokymountainnews.com)