Time Machine Do Over
A week ago Friday, I found myself at an urgent care facility with my 8-year-old, Cort. Less than 20 minutes before, we’d been waiting for his older brother to play baseball at the ballpark. To entertain himself before the game, Cort ambled over to sit on a wooden step and took a swipe with his hand to clean it off before plopping down. When he started crying, I rushed over. As I neared, he lifted his hand to show a splinter sticking out of his index finger.
Wait. Splinter is the wrong word. “Wood chunk” better describes it. Blood flowed from the wound, running down into the creases of his finger as he held his wrist with his other hand. I tried to calm him as I started to whisk the chunk out. The half-inch of wood protruding from his finger gave me plenty to grab.
Sometimes things don’t turn out the way you see them in your head. Instead of the wood chunk slipping right out, the part I tugged on broke off. Not until I cleared the blood away did I realize he had jammed that piece of wood entirely through the tip of his finger. Some of the blood had been coming from where the wood had pierced his skin on the way out.
Urgent care, here we come.
With a scared kid in tow, I asked another parent to stay with my older son. As we rushed to the car, Cort didn’t make a sound, but tears spilled down his cheeks. When I opened the car door for Cort to climb in, he sobbed and said, “They’re never going to get it out.”
“They’ll get it out,” I replied. But inside, I cringed, trying to imagine how.
After a few seconds of silence, Cort said one more thing. “I wish I had a time machine so I could go back and not do it.”
Yes, Cort, I thought. You, me, and everyone in the world.
His statement bounced through my head all weekend. Some say they wouldn’t change anything in their past, citing that everything happens for a reason. But that’s easy to say since we can’t go back. How tempting would it be if one could slip into a time machine and erase a boneheaded mistake or reverse a horrible outcome? I'd have extreme trouble narrowing the field if I could only pick one "do-over."
But time machines don’t exist. At least not yet. So we must take comfort that those scarring events yield gems, ones our minds polish to a high sheen as we replay them numerous times within our heads. Whether the process takes minutes or years, that sheen ultimately burns this valuable conviction within us:
Until Cort's time machine is invented, we should embrace our scars, both inside and out. I noticed a t-shirt a month ago that conveyed it well: Scars are tattoos with better stories.
Back to the little guy's finger. The doctor pumped so much numbing agent into the top of it the tip swelled to the size of a grape. After enlarging the entry point with a scalpel, the doctor removed the offending object with surgical tweezers. Know that Cort took the whole procedure better than I did. When I was younger, blood never bothered me, even my own. Watching your kids bleed is a different story.
Cort played the next day as if nothing bad had happened, but wheels always turning in that boy's noggin. Several times I tried to imagine what flowed through his mind as I watched him lift his eyes from his Legos to stare into space. I hope his head is filled with time machine blueprints.
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