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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Life Shells Out Our Burdens, Flaws

Bill Tammeus Kansas City Star

I do not, I would guess, collect seashells the way most people do.

Which is to say I don’t look for perfection. There is, in fact, probably no such thing as perfection in seashells.

And clearly there is none in people.

What makes people interesting, what makes them different and, thus, worth noticing at all, are their variations, their oddities, all the funny curves and bulges, the stretched sinews, scarred skin, bruised souls.

It is, at least for me, the same with seashells.

This afternoon, as I stood at the water’s edge here on Florida’s gulf coast and let the cool waves slap and kiss my imperfect feet, I watched for gifts of shells to be deposited on the sand.

One of my favorite finds today was a shiny, nearly black fragment.

I am no scholar of shells, but I know this is a piece of a pen shell because I picked up some full pen shells the other day on the beach at Sanibel Island. An elderly man saw those shells - full but oddly scarred - and asked derisively, “Are those your treasures?”

On Sanibel, people come to the beach well before dawn to find the beautiful full shells the sea lifts out overnight. Many of those people probably would not understand my attachment to intriguing imperfection.

But when I look at this dark mother-of-pearlish shell section, its edges smoothed by the slopping of the sea, I imagine the battles it had fought to get here, how the tides and undertows, over which it had no control, had kicked it around, tested its mettle, its tensile strength, its very character.

Sometimes, you can look at people and see, especially on their faces, the stunning forces that - like the sea battering this shell - have cuffed them around. Their mouths turn down, their eyelids droop, exhausted by a world they cannot manage.

When I was growing up, I knew a boy named Danny. We were not close friends, but his mother was my Cub Scout den mother one year.

Danny used crutches - metal affairs with leather bands that strapped onto his wrists. I think he had polio. Whatever it was, his legs were nearly useless.

But Danny was strong, not only in upper body power but also in self-reliance. I found Danny engaging. I wanted to know why he didn’t simply fling away his damnable crutches in frustration and let himself go limp so others would have to care for him. But I was too shy or inarticulate to ask.

Not long ago - more than 40 years after I had gone to Danny’s house for Cub Scouts - I was visiting my hometown, eating in a restaurant with a friend. Who should walk by the front window but Danny, still on crutches, still stocky and muscular, still fascinating to me.

I regret now that I did not run out and greet him. He is the very embodiment of what I mean by imperfections making people interesting, making them who they are as they respond to those flaws.

One of the shells I picked up today has lovely brown imperfect rectangles on its back. But that’s not why I saved it.

Rather, I added it to my strange collection because four small white parasitic shells had attached themselves to one side of it. The larger shell - like a ship’s hull full of barnacles - had become the vehicle of transport for the smaller shells.

I do not think the attached shells have destroyed the larger shell’s beauty. Instead, I think they have added intrigue to it, creating a story no other shell can tell in exactly that way.

People, too, carry evidence of the burdens that make them real, that test them, that make them whole.

On my right thumb, I have a scar from a tin can that sliced me at age 3. On the back of my left hand, there’s a scar from a fall on the ice while doing something for one of my daughters. And on my heart, there are the scars of disappointment and pain.

These scars are what, in the end, make us complete. That’s because we are like the shells I have gathered today.

In some profound way, we are the sum of our scarred parts. We all should be stamped “irregular.”

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