I’m not sure what the societal consensus is with respect to a man having character. But I propose that to become a man with character requires having overcome some painful experience through acceptance and resolve. I’m not claiming to be a man with character. That is for the people who know me to decide but an experience I had as a boy and the way my grandfather handled it has, for me, become a template for developing character.
As a pre-adolescent boy, I was extremely active. I am sure I would have had a diagnosis of some kind had I been born in 1989 rather than 1949. My trips to the doctor were not for evaluations for ADHD but to have stitches for yet another cut I had endured in one of my misadventures. In those days people didn’t go to the emergency room for such things. The doctor stitched you up in the office.
I was perhaps ten or eleven years old and was playing softball after school at P.S. 102 in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn where I grew up. I was the second baseman and our field was the asphalt schoolyard framed by the el shaped building. A Texas league pop fly was hit to short center field and I took off after it. Running full tilt and keeping my eye on the ball, I dove for the ball attempting to make a backhand catch. Schoolyard folklore has it that I made the catch. I am not so sure since I momentarily blacked out when my head and the knee of the center fielder collided. What I remember was the blood.
I had split my cheek open and one of the teachers was trying to staunch the flow of blood with those rough brown paper towels that were standard issue in the bathrooms of NY city public schools at that time. After the blood flow had slowed, the teacher took a look at my face and informed me that I should avoid a career as a prizefighter since it was clear I was a real “cutter.”
I walked home holding the paper towel to my face and when my mother saw what happened, she told me we had to leave right away to get me stitched up. I told her I needed to go to the bathroom and she said, “Okay, but don’t look in the mirror.”
I remember resisting the sidelong glance into the mirror on my way to the commode. On the way out I rinsed my hands at the sink and just could not help myself. I had to check out what had happened to my face. When I looked in the mirror I saw this enormous gash and the flap of flesh hanging down the right side of my face. I was horrified and burst into tears.
That Sunday we visited my maternal grandparents and my mother must have told my grandfather the story because he made a point of pulling me aside. There are twenty-five first cousins in my family and whenever we visited my grandparents there were always at least ten of us running around the house. So, to get a private audience from Gido (Arabic for grandfather) was quite an occasion.
He sat me down and said he wanted to look at my stitches. He proceeded to remove gently peel away the bandage. As the wound came into view, his eyes grew wide, shook his head and said in his heavy Arabic accent, “That is very ugly. It looks very bad.”
I was stunned.
He continued to examine the stitches, turning his head one way and the other to get a better view and continued, “You know when the stitches come out it’s still going to look ugly. It will be all puffy and red. There may even be some puss. It will take a long, long time to heal. Even then there will still be an ugly scar.”
I don’t remember what I thought or felt but I know I was completely entranced and I was hanging on every word. He continued:
“In time the scar will begin to fade –very slowly. At first, you won’t even notice. Very slowly over many years, it will become part of your face and when you grow up to be a man this thing will give your face character. People will look at you and say, “There is a man with character!”
I am now a 70 year-old man who is completely bald. In my late twenties, I had basal cell carcinoma on my nose that required three surgeries. Eventually, a skin graft was done so that now the entire right side of my already crooked nose is a patch of skin that was removed from the back of my ear. In short, there is more than enough “wrong” with my face for me to be embarrassed and ashamed of my appearance. Yet, it has never occurred to me that my face is in any way unappealing.
As a psychologist, I understand how trauma can isolate and shame its victims. By addressing my pain directly, my grandfather demonstrated how acceptance is honorable and denial unnecessary. By predicting I would one day be a member of a larger community and be seen in a positive light, he helped me to see beyond the teasing that was characteristic of the boy culture of my youth. That this required a long time is, I think, an apt metaphor for what it takes to be a man with character.
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Excerpted from an article previously published on Solstice Lit Mag
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