Sharp words lay open cuts more grievous than any dagger. More deep, more slow to heal they fester in the spirit with contagion most foul. The scars that words leave behind do not fade with time, but sensible to every touch, bleed hurt anew and gape with the softest brushing. A dagger's thrust, however deep, withdraws and leaves behind twined open flesh to meld and rejoin unto itself. It is cleanly done, its target known and intended.

Words that cut are cast into the open air and wound all those to whose ears they may come. So it is with those sharp edged words we use to set others apart from us, like "queer" or "fag" or "nigger" or "kike" or "sheeny" or all the other words that single out the stranger for opprobrium. Said at a restaurant table, cast into the ether as a weapon of opportunity, they may come to rest in a stranger's ear. So was it with me last Friday.

Each Friday at noon we gather at the Iron Horse Restaurant to discuss the issues of the day and one of our number launched into a round of vicious humor directed at homosexuals. My son is homosexual and worse he is mentally ill and vulnerable to exploitation. Each day the dawn finds me wondering if this is the day I learn he has contracted HIV.

I bear my private trials privately. I do not rail against personal injustices of fate. No one at the table knew of that affliction save one. Alas it was the one that spoke and directed the conversation. The speaker knew and knew how those words would wound. But he could not know what others in that crowded room those cutting words he meant for me had injured. There have been other words said at that table that wounded but I have shrugged off those scratches knowing them spoken without malicious aim toward me.

You see unknown to my lunch companions are a multitude of facts. When my family gathers to celebrate holidays we include those whose heritage includes Africa, Latin America and those who created civilizations on this continent while Europe languished in the dark. Catholic and Protestant, Jew and Gentile are all part of my family. Choose a word to throw and it will strike at me or at one of mine. No epithet, racial slur, or religious bigotry can miss hitting a mark in my being.

But this one, this gaping wound, I could not shrug away. It struck deep, deep into the center because one who had claimed to be my friend directed its hurt. This time I could not bear it in silence, yet concern for the others' sensibilities would not permit me to confront the speaker with his cruelty. Instead I left the table, telling my companions only that the conversation had grown too painful for me to bear.

I have reflected since then, reflected that how ever deep the wound, however sharp the pain, however lasting the trauma, the damage done to the speaker by uttering his words would longer endure than the pain inflicted on his target. I have reflected too how many I have harmed unknowingly in a lifetime of 64 years. I am a product of that same provincial small town and learned the same vocabulary of disdain. I too have used those cutting words. My hands are not clean but as I write the closing chapters of my life I pray that I may have left that vocabulary and the cruelty that goes with it behind me and the burden of it be lifted from me.

Cruelty comes at a dear price and its reward is but meager and fleeting. The cost of kindness is measured by a feather's weight and its return incalculable and everlasting.