Scuffed

Nothing makes a City Council meeting go slower than blood pooling in your shoe.  Even an unhurried remembrance from the Fifth Ward doyen is a too-short delight in comparison to looking down to see if you are leaking on the floor.  Curt Shilling took the Red Sox thing literally and made an extra $92,613 by avoiding the laundry and selling the hosiery at auction.  There was no such auction (or market) for my blood-stained dress sock.  It is lost to the other antiquities at the Buffalo landfill.  

The Council meeting came after the Davenport vs. Rock Island softball game, so the oozing wound would have to wait.  Here’s a tip.  Don’t make a sliding catch on the Modern Woodmen Park infield dirt in athletic shorts.  It is basically concrete, with some reddish pathogens mixed in.  Ballplayers wear pants and sliding shorts for a reason.  I knew that, of course, but an out had to be made and there wasn’t time to change into proper infield legwear while running in from center field.  Live and learn.

I recently learned Mayor Gluba and I have something in common.  Namely; a severe reaction to an antibiotic.  On the way home from the Council meeting, I stopped at Genesis and they put Bactroban on the abrasion.  An hour later, I returned with a leg three times its normal size.  Here’s another tip.  Don’t image search “allergic contact dermatitis”.  You’ve been warned.

So, the right leg added a Davenport scar.  About ten square inches, and kind of shaped like Iowa, so that’s a nice touch. Misadventures in home improvements, the love-hate relationship with gravity and entry points for surgeries always scheduled on Fridays added a few more, but the leg one is the line of duty physical souvenir.  That, and the grey temples.  It could always be worse.  The wellness program avoidant employee dancing in the alley, a little too unclothed and self-amorous to stay on the payroll, is filed neatly with the other less vivid psychological wounds, so I’ll take a baseball scar and grey hair any day.    

Trust is the coin of the realm, and trust begins with truth.  So out comes the camera for the updated head and shoulders shot.  Professional.  Approachable.  Affable.  Urban but not distractingly so.  The subject makes the first three requirements hit or miss, but the setting makes the fourth a piece of cake.  The Skybridge.  Some angled glass, a fifty millimeter lens and the luck of the 1/125 second slice of light that finds its way to the DSLR sensor.  Not up to Darryl’s standards, but it’ll have to do.  They want a bio, with a picture. 

The essence of the question is; would you rather have a brand new Ferrari 488 or a 1963 Aston Martin DB5?  Shiny new C7 or C2 Vette with patina?  A beige house fresh off the production homebuilder assembly line or a mid-century classic like the Farnsworth House?  I could say there’s no one right answer, but that wouldn’t be true.

Someone you’ve never met or a timeless friend?  Some fresh piece of asphalt or the street you grew up on?  A song you’ve sung a thousand times or a passing fad?  A baseball fresh out of the box or one that’s been scuffed up a little? 

I’ll take scuffed up, any day.  There’s interest, history and - one hopes – empathy and wisdom in the scuffing.