Skin Deep

We’ve all heard the question, What is the body’s largest organ? I first heard it in a high school science class, and after letting the more intrepid students venture that it was the stomach, or the brain, or the lungs, the teacher told us, with a hint of smugness, that the correct answer was the skin. As such, it’s a spacious, fertile field for trouble. At various times as a kid I had boils, warts, and what my parents called a “Bible” cyst, a lump poking up from my wrist like the summit of an underwater mountain. It was reputed to go away if given a good whack with a heavy book, hence the name. The home Bible wasn’t that heavy, though, at least in a literal sense, and I never tried it. Someone may have suggested a dictionary. I didn’t try that either and the unsightly protuberance eventually went away on its own, but not before starring for years as an annoying conversation piece. As in, “What’s that thing on your wrist?”

When I started doing construction work in my early thirties, my skin turned into a canvas of abrasions, contusions, cuts, splinters, and all the other manifestations of mishandled tools and errant pieces of wood and plain bad luck. To add injury to injury, the work was often performed in the full, toxic burn of the sun. Throw in a couple of high-speed bicycle crashes, which left permanent scars on one elbow and knee, and it’s no wonder that the glimpse I get in the mirror after stepping out of the shower isn’t one I care to dwell upon.

But skin also has its metaphorical employments. My father, who embraced aphorism as an aid to his children’s education, would say, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” I understood this to mean that there wasn’t a single way to do something, but I didn’t understand why someone would skin a cat, and if they did, what method they would use, other than the one I had seen in the skinning of squirrels and rabbits. A short search of the internet didn’t cast much light on that question, but I did learn that a children’s gymnastic move on the playground is called “to skin a cat,” and that in some parts of the world, before the advent of synthetic fabrics, cat fur was used for garments, although it was considered inferior to the pelts of such animals as foxes and beavers.

Growing up I would hear the term “skinflint” from time to time and knew it to be someone who hated spending money, although it wasn’t until I read “A Christmas Carol” that I connected the concept to a living, breathing human being, albeit a fictional one in the form of Mr. Scrooge. The internet informs me that “skinning a flint” pops up in the 17^th century to denote extreme miserliness, but I’m still in the dark about why a flint would be “skinned” and what, exactly, that has to do with being tightfisted.

When I was a little older, I learned of the existence of “skin” magazines, surreptitiously brought to school and eagerly pored over by boys in a corner of the schoolyard. If caught, the boys would be punished and the magazines seized as contraband, although there were rampant rumors that the principal didn’t destroy them but kept them in a desk drawer, to pull out after his secretary went home. There were “skin flicks,” where I imagined the figures in the magazines coming to life and prancing about. They all would have perfect skin, of course. When I had my first look at a Playboy centerfold, my impression was of extraordinary smoothness, no wrinkles, no bumps, no scars. No rashes or warts. These specimens of pulchritudinous perfection seemed unworldly; only later did I hear that airbrushing is used to erase defects and flaws.

There are others. Having “skin in the game,” for example, which I never heard as a child, although a man might say, “I don’t have a dog in the hunt,” which was in keeping with our rural environment, where hunting with dogs was a common pastime and someone without a dog was out of the action, a bystander. “Skin in the game,” I’m told by an internet source, derives from a type of golf competition in which points won are skins. The source was silent on the question of why these points are called skins, and since I’ve never played golf and have little interest in doing so, I didn’t spend time researching the matter further.

And there’s “thin skin.” I have that malady, or condition if you’d rather call it that. Literally. Two weeks ago, I rebuilt a section of fence on our property line. I wore gloves, as I almost always do now in the performance of physical labor, and a long-sleeve shirt. But because I had to maneuver at close quarters around a tree and rose bushes, there was scratching and scraping and when I took off my shirt I was greeted with familiar lurid patches beneath the skin of my arms. I also wore shorts, and there is a record of each encounter with rose thorns and tree bark on my legs. But do I have thin skin in the figurative sense? I figured that if anyone could answer that question with authority, it would be my wife. But dare I ask her? I’ve known a few people I would call thin-skinned, ready to erupt at trivial slights, going through life, it would seem, being rubbed the wrong way and anxious to let others know about it. I suppose it’s better than being insensitive, but I’d prefer to think of myself as neither.

The skin does have the advantage of being, so to speak, an open book. The malfunctions of certain other organs of mine, like the heart and prostate gland, had to be discovered, or confirmed, by scans and tests, some of an invasive nature. By contrast, when I had a lingering spot on the side of my nose the dermatologist only had to look to discover its suspicious nature, although a biopsy was needed to confirm that it was a basal cell carcinoma. I’m going to see him this week to check a spot on my ear that has overstayed its welcome, and I hope he’ll deem it benign, although I’m prepared to hear that it’s a basal or squamous cell carcinoma, or—the word itself has an ominous sound—a melanoma.

When I was a kid, summer meant going shirtless, enduring the pain and itchy peeling of sunburn in order to flaunt a deep, rich tan, and even after abandoning that unwise practice in adulthood, I never used sunscreen until I started hiking on unshaded mountain trails. Too little, too late? Another of my father’s favorite aphorisms was, “The chickens always come home to roost,” and while it took a long time, I finally understood what that meant in terms of cause and effect as it might operate over days and months and even years.

But one of the most common skin-related adages I heard as a child was “Beauty is only skin deep.” Maybe I can rephrase that now to say that what we regard as ugly or unsightly in the human image is only skin deep. The most prominent visual reminders of having reached my ninth decade, the face in the mirror with its topography of folds and creases; the thatch of sparse, white hair; the mottled parchment of the arms, the blue corrugation of veins on the back of the hands; the Rorscach-like blotches; the warts, the wens, the eruptions, all displayed on a surface that at any given point may be less than one-tenth of a millimeter thick. Beneath that spotted, desiccated surface may flow the blood of a noble person, not in the sense of someone who holds a hereditary title, but in manifestations of courage, honesty, uprightness. At least I can tell myself so.