I guess we all quite often take our good friends for granted.  This is especially true of the longtime ones.  Well, it took a relatively new friend to show me the way.  Just last week, my new friend wrote a blog piece on her reactions to being asked personal questions.  Her reactions are basically of the “none of your business” type.   My first reaction - the one of the enlightened more “senior” Dave Moon - was, “I love being asked questions!” 

Then.  I remembered my old friend of over five decades.

My old friend encouraged and helped initiated personal questions of me, beginning way back when I met my first non-family members - when I was first allowed to interact with other little humans in Kindergarten.  The questions were always the same.  Young five-year and six-year and 10-year and beyond-year olds just never seemed to be able to craft the perfectly tasteful question.

“So how ja git that scar?”

For years and years that one simple, stupid, rude and reasonable question just seemed to make the shoulders on my relatively tall young frame slump even more than they naturally did.  I’ve had that scar on my face since I was two years old.  I rarely even think about it.  To this day, I have to look in the mirror to remember just what facial cheek is scarred.  But the kid questions… well they always pretty much forced me to think about it.

My answer?

“Uh - I fell on a broken flower base when I was two-years-old.  Uh…”

I hated that answer.  It was the truth.  But I hated it.  It was almost always met with tiny rolled eyes and “Oh, really?” responses that would have made the most socially savvy parents proud.  I tired of that question early on.  Along with the ultra clever, “How’s the weather up there?”  I really did kind of tower over the hateful little questioners.  I learned to be bored with both questions.

At some point - I’m not quite sure when - I decided that my own freedom from boredom was worth the fire and brimstone I would surely endure if I lied about such stuff.  So, I started to lie about how I met my old friend.  I must have been a young teen when all the lying began commencing.  I don’t think I had that sort of thing in me prior to those rebellious years.  And by the time I was a teenager, I was really sick of the rolled eyes and the condescending verbal responses to the lame flower vase truth.

So the new answers about my old friend became my fresh reality.  As George Costanza once said, “Jerry, just remember.  If YOU believe it, it’s not a lie.”

“So how ja git that scar?”

“I was walking along the railroad tracks one day, when I suddenly saw a beautiful woman who had passed out on the tracks.  I looked to the north and saw a speeding train heading our way around a curve.  I dove across the tracks to pull the woman to safety just as the train sped by.  That gravel scarred me pretty good, huh?”

“So how ja git that scar?”

“My dad was the volunteer fire chief in Roanoke Valley, Virginia.  One day a massive forest fire broke out in the mountains surrounding Roanoke.  The fire was under control, but all roads leading into the valley were closed and impassable.  An elderly woman with diabetes was trapped in the valley, and she had run out of insulin.  The only way to get insulin to the old woman was by parachuting it in.  The woods were thick and the fire was raging.  The volunteer fire guys were all too big and busy to parachute through the tightly packed pines.  The only way to save the old woman was to have a small child parachute into the valley, maneuver through the thickets and deliver the insulin.  Since my dad was the Fire Chief, well……  I got the scar from a pine tree branch as I parachuted in to save the old woman.”

“So how ja git that scar?”

(My personal favorite! The other answers took too long to tell.)  “I got it in a knife fight! Want to make something of it?”

As an older teen and even college student, I actually had a few rather attractive and appealing young women believing me a few times.  That is until one of two good friends who both seemed to delight in my being dissed by young, attractive women would say something like, “So - are you lying again, Scarface?”

I guess old friends, especially ones that live on right or left cheeks, kind of keep a man honest, huh?  And if those friends don’t, well - there are always others who will.