I have a matching set of scars on the first knuckle of all my fingers on my right hand (except my thumb). They are what I affectionately refer to as my pool scars.
When I was eleven or twelve, I loved diving down to the bottoms of swimming pools and then swimming down there for as long as I could. One day, as I dove down, I misjudged the distance between my hand and the bottom of the pool, resulting in a quick trip to the surface and a great deal of sheepishness on my part.
This got all my fingers except my index, which some people would be happy about, I suppose, but I was just peeved that I didn’t have a full set. Yet.
Some weeks later, I was playing pool with some friends, and I misjudged the distance between my hand and the corner of the pool table. Crashed my index finger right into it. (Gee, was I having an awkward clumsy phase then or what?) (To be fair, though, I’m pretty sure that was right after the summer I grew two inches in two months.)
Then, a couple years ago, I noticed that the scar on my ring finger was fading and wasn’t so easy to see anymore. I kid you not, only a couple weeks after I made that realization, I banged into something and got a new scar on the first knuckle of my index finger, almost exactly in the same place as the old one. Since I’m definitely over that awkward clumsy phase, the only thing I can blame this on is some sort of subconscious conspiracy.
Anyways. That’s how I got my pool scars.
(Everything above was originally posted as a comment on this post at TMF Project. Everything below was not.)
I’m pretty sure I got these scars when I was twelve, rather than eleven, because they were still a novel thing in my mind when we moved back from Alabama to Alberta. Also because they happened around the same time I learned that fire ant bites look a lot like pimples.
