Early one morning a few days before Thanksgiving, when I was headed into Polk Street Methodist Church to speak to their men’s breakfast group, I learned how hard Methodist concrete can be. In the pre-dawn darkness, I hooked my right toe under a bumper curb and splatted face-forward on the sidewalk.
I’m sure the resulting contusions would have been bloody for anybody, but being an old geezer on blood thinner meds meant that I was a mess that morning. As we Texans have said all of my life, I bled like a stuck pig. Even after I got inside and washed the streams of blood out of my eye sockets and off my nose, I still looked like I had been mauled.
For several weeks after that nose-dive, I was reluctant to be seen in public. My battered face looked like I was wearing a Halloween mask. I didn’t want to scare people. But when the wounds finally did heal and the bloody scabs fell off, they left behind a forehead scar even more visible than one I had worn most of my life…