I have three significant scars on my body. One is from a surgery I had as an infant to correct pyloric stenosis; one is from a biking accident I had when I was about 10; and a third — on my chin — is from another biking accident I had when I was 21.
The scar on my chin came to mind today because of a Facebook post I’d seen by the Alumni Association at my alma mater, Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. Several photographs were included in the post, one of which was this one…
No date accompanied the photo, so I don’t know when it was taken, but the two buildings at upper center — the Student Recreation Center (right) and the Moore Musical Arts Center (left) were built in 1979, and the Saddlemire Student Services Building, the round-shaped building below them, was razed in 2007 to make way for Wolfe Center for the Arts. The fraternity houses at the bottom right appear to be gone now according to Google Maps. That’s quite a time span, but I have a feeling it was closer to 1979 than 2007. The place pretty much looked like this when I left it in 1981.
Regardless, the reason the picture brings the scar on my chin to mind is that in the spring of 1977, I had begun seeing Lisa Salisbury, my first real, official girlfriend. I was commuting from Toledo in my 1974 Super Beetle at the time, and I had a bike rack on the back, so I brought my beautiful coffee-coloured ten-speed Campania road bike with me every day with me for getting around campus. Lisa and I had met in a Popular Culture class the first day of spring quarter (back when there were quarters), and we hit it off pretty quickly. Believe it or not, I was twenty-one years old and had yet to eat a bagel — despite that my mother was from New York City. Lisa opened my eyes to the bagel. Also… deep-fried mushrooms. Both delicacies were available at SamB’s, which was across East Wooster Street from campus. (It has since moved to downtown Bowling Green.)
For probably a year after that, my regular brunch, which I would eat while sipping coffee and studying or reading the latest issue of Rolling Stone at the Student Union, was a bagel with butter and creamed cheese. You can’t imagine how much I loved those bagels. Oddly enough, I recall one of the people working the counter asking me “with butter AND creamed cheese?!?” As if she’d never heard of it!
Lisa also had a bike, a green Fuji ten-speed, and now that I think about it, we might not have done much riding together off-campus. I was still majoring in Journalism at the time, and she was in Social Work, so our classes didn’t intersect except for that one time. (Popular Culture was a required course for both of us, I think.) Also, I was still commuting, so how it came to be that on that spring day we were riding together from the west side of campus back to Ashley Hall in the Kreischer Quadrangle, where she lived, I can’t recall. I do recall meeting up with her once on the grass in front of Williams Hall, also on the west side of campus… it might have been that day. What remains vivid, however, is that she was riding alongside me on my right. We were just cruising along at a not-too-brisk pace, when all of a sudden, she started to turn to her left, to take the sidewalk that angled towards Anderson Arena, likely her habitual route. I wasn’t thinking about the best way or the quickest way back to her dorm, I was riding straight ahead. She didn’t crash into me — I reacted quickly enough to avoid her — but I didn’t react quickly enough to keep my front wheel on the sidewalk. It dropped to the grass, which was probably a good three-inch drop from the concrete, and I — one hundred percent certain that I would be able to get the wheel back up on the sidewalk with nothing but sheer will — held tight to the handlebars. I fell to the concrete.
Confidence can be dangerous sometimes. In that moment, I was so sure I was going to be able to get that wheel up onto the sidewalk, that I didn’t let go of the handlebars: “I can do this!” Up until that moment in my life, I had always gotten my hands down in front of me whenever I fell. I’m pretty sure that it’s the cardinal rule of falling! But… confidence! I also had made the mistake of riding with my feet in the toe clips, which meant that I couldn’t get my left foot out to stop my downward momentum.
With my hands still gripping the handlebars, and my foot still on the pedals, my chin hit the concrete. It felt like my head had exploded. The first six words out of my mouth were really just the repetition of one word, and no, dear autocorrect, it wasn’t “Duck!”
This all happened late afternoon as everything on campus was winding down. I don’t recall how I got medical attention. A few people who’d seen it all happen came by to help, so I imagine one of them contacted the Department of Public Services (DPS). I recall cops arriving. I think I managed to walk with the bike to DPS which was probably no more than a couple of blocks away (I’m pretty sure it’s that the long narrow building just above Anderson Arena in the photo). Possibly, I rode with the cops and Lisa walked my bike over. Someone there stitched me up. The problem, of course, was that there really wasn’t all that much to sew together as the concrete had pulverized the skin more than it had split it. I was given a shot to numb the chin area, however, and some stitches were threaded. And I was given pain killers which precluded me from driving back to Toledo that night, which meant I got to stay with Lisa. So, I guess there was an up side! Her roommate wasn’t all too thrilled, and I think my mom was skeptical about the “accident” until I got home the next day.
So much for the scar. Or, well, maybe not…
Lisa and I continued to see each other until the end of that summer. She lived in West Lafayette, Ohio, about a four-hour drive from Toledo, and I drove down a couple of times to see her. It was a beautiful two-lane winding-road drive once I got off US-23 near Columbus. I met her parents and her three brothers, one of whom also went to Bowling Green at the time. It was a great summer, and I was looking forward to seeing her every day at school in the fall when I moved into my dorm at Harshman-Bromfield. But that wasn’t to be. She had been seeing someone when we’d met (as I recall, he grew popcorn somewhere south of Bowling Green), but I was under the impression he was history or soon to be. Once I got moved in to my dorm, I called her to get the details of where and when I should meet her to help her move in to her apartment. Which is when I found out the other guy was helping her. Without really discussing what was going on, I said good-bye and hung up. I jumped to conclusions that might have been unfounded. That was that.
Life went on for both of us. At some point in 1980, I got the news from a mutual friend that Lisa’s 15-year-old — and youngest — brother, Matthew, or Bay as we knew him, had killed himself. But we weren’t really in touch by that time. I recall running into her around then and talking briefly to her about her brother. It might have been the last time I saw her before she graduated that year.
Many years later, after I’d moved to Michigan and gotten married and started a family, I learned she also lived in Michigan. I don’t know how I learned this because there was, of course, no internet at the time. I think I might have even sent her a card to say hello. Many years later again (2013), after the internet had come along, we became Facebook friends but we didn’t interact all that much. She commented on a photo of me taken not long after we’d been together, and I made a few comments here and there on her page. I sent her a message thanking her for accepting my request to connect, and updating her on the thirty-plus years of my life that had gone by, but she never read it. In fact, I’m sure she never saw it. She was married and had three kids, and appeared to have a tight group of friends with whom she played soccer. She had a good life it seemed. I really wish, though, that we could have had a catch-up conversation. It would have been… just… nice.
I was shocked to find in July of 2014 that she’d died of some form of cancer. Her last Facebook post, though, on 16 February announced: “On my way to Vegas, then onto California!!!” At the time, I thought, “oh, man… you’d better not come to San Francisco without letting me know!” but I came to believe after I’d heard the news that it was probably a ‘one-last-thing-before-I-go trip’… maybe something she’d always wanted to do but hadn’t gotten around to.
Scars. They’re signs of healing, but they’re also reminders, although not necessarily of just the injuries that brought them about. For five or six months, Lisa meant the world to me, and every time I shave in the mirror and catch sight of my scar, it all comes tumbling back almost fifty years later: listening to Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life, George Benson’s Breezin’, and Al Stewart’s Year Of The Cat in her dorm room, seeing Star Wars in a theatre in Coshocton, Ohio, gently mocking her roommate for her Todd Rundgren obsession, or tanning on the “beach” outside Ashley Hall with her floor-mates after classes. Oh… and our comical first date, mentioned here. (It occurs to me now after re-reading/editing this for about the bazillionth time, that Lisa met my parents that night.)
Lisa’s birthday still comes along every year despite that she’s not around to celebrate it, and every year, Facebook reminds me of it. Every year, too, I click over to her page to see others wishing her happy birthday, and I wonder how many of them do so without knowing that she’s gone. And it’s just as often that I have had this urge to write about her and our brief romance or affair or whatever it was because so much of what followed started with her.
