When I was almost twenty, I had an operation to remove a stomach ulcer. I was living in England at the time and had the operation at a hospital near Canterbury. It was harder on my family than on me. (Someone said, "No young man thinks he is going to die.") I had some major blood transfusions, and I suppose I might have got AIDS like Arthur Ashe, but I didn't! Just like when my mother didn't take the headache pills that might have been thalidomide...
The operation left a scar down the front of my abdomen, all the way down to my navel. (I can show it to people who are interested.) The sutures also left pinpoints. I was reading that Dolly Parton had an operation like mine and disguised her scar with a butterfly tattoo!
Do I have emotional scars? I guess we all do, but in my case they don't seem worth talking about.
I like Howard Hawks' gangster movie Scarface with Paul Muni and George Raft. Brian de Palma's remake with Al Pacino wasn't nearly as good. I remember that around the time when the remake was released, I had a dream where I returned to my hometown as a famous criminal!
No comments:
Post a Comment