Denting the Carapace #2
Years back, I interviewed a woman who was part of British Intelligence during WWII. She and I met regularly for two years and had tea and cookies together as she told me her stories. We discussed the war, strategy, her teaching career, egg cozies, life lessons… She told me oh so many things. Here is one of them:
“The things that happen to you in life make you what you are. And make you sometimes different because the more you build inner reserves the better you’ll be to face life.
“When people don’t have too many experiences or things that they have to wrestle with in a most uncomfortable manner, they never learn. They never learn because they don’t know how to learn. Nothing’s happened to them that ever dents that carapace.
“There are a few things that I’ve had happen to me in life that I wish hadn’t. And there are many things that I’d like to have done better, who doesn’t? But it’s what you face up to.”
When I think of these words I think simultaneously of the scar on my knee from ice skating, the scar on my temple from a carcinoma, and I think of the time a parking attendant in Washington, D.C., explained to me that a fire extinguisher was dropped on my new Jeep. Suddenly perfection is gone. You mourn the way things used to be. You replay events in your mind, willing yourself to go back in time, mad at yourself for not realizing how good you had it before the destruction came.
And then, with time, you start to realize the dents and scars are just part of the story. Our story. They mean we lived through something, that we’ve seen things, and learned things--that we’re alive. And it’s okay to be a big old duck-taped-together wreck because we’re here. We’re still here. And the marks prove that we can walk through fire and come out the other side, forged.
~
The first Denting the Carapace is on my original blog at http://www.finelinebooks.wordpress.com. It includes the WWII Veteran’s quote and then goes on to thank our military men and women for the freedoms they defend. I posted it on Memorial Day 2014.
