Facing the Lines
Click here for a full audio-visual version of this adventure vignette.
“You have a line right here,” he says, tracing horizontally across my forehead. “And here, and here, and here.” His small finger brushes at all the places where the skin on my forehead has creased. “And you have two here, but they’re going in the other direction. Perpendicular,” he says. “We learned that in math last week.”
“What do they mean?” I ask, trying not to let my eyes give anything away about the answer I hope he gives. I had just confessed my nervousness to him about a new adventure I was trying that evening. I asked him what I should say to myself. He told me what I have told him before, “you get to have an adventure not many people do. It’s your first time. If you aren’t good, so what?” So I hoped it was related to that.
Instead, he says, “it means that you’re old.”
“It does,” I respond, “In a way.” I want to say – it means I have years on the surface of this skin. But if old means that I am jaded and closed, I am not.
“Where are mine?” he asks, tracing his own forehead and above the bridge of his nose with his pointer finger. “I don’t have them.”
“Yet,” I say.
Then I think, but do not utter, I hope that you do someday. I hope that you get to be the age where you possess those lines. You may not like them but I will.
I will love those lines, should they come to rest on your face, because it will mean that you spent time in the sun and held thousands of days in your hands. It means you will have survived. It means that you have chosen yes to the color blue and to existing tomorrow. Because there will be times when you may not want to.
Then I do say it, “I hope you do.” Because even though he only has ten years and his face is unblemished, it bears saying. Maybe he will hear it someday when he needs to.
I so hope that you do.
Inspired by events
in Park City Utah, on the land of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone and the Ute Indian Tribe.