My Life and Karate, Day Five

My dojo, Sun Dragon Martial Arts and Self Defense, is running its major yearly fundraiser. We're a nonprofit martial arts studio, which is something of a rare beast, and we raise money every year for our scholarship fund and the free self-defense classes we offer in the community. For my part, every day until the day of the Kickathon, I will write a random amusing anecdote about karate and self-defense - enjoy!

This morning I lifted some weights and then sparred a little with an old friend of mine, and that brought to mind some of our more amusing attempts at martial arts of years past. Eight or nine years ago, a work friend of hers said he had a buddy who studied Kuk Sool Won, which is a particularly weapons-heavy Korean style (the guy who played Darth Maul studies it.) He'd offered to teach them a bit of swordwork, and were we interested?

I am not sure Jo really was, but I definitely was, and she is nothing if not a good sport. So we ordered cheap katanas off the internet and trooped out one Sunday afternoon to a dead-end street somewhere in Bastrop, where we could swing live steel at each other without anyone calling the cops.

We did this a few Saturdays without incident, learning the basics - how to hold the sword, basic safety and etiquette, and the first dozen or so moves in a sword kata. Afterwards, we'd go to lunch and listen to our ex-Navy teacher's bar brawl stories, of which he had many.

We'd been doing this for several weeks when I managed to get my first sword-related scar. It's probably the most pathetic scar on my body. I was finishing up the sword kata when I mimed the sheathing motion and managed to nick the cuticle of my thumb. Just clumsiness, that was all - I barely felt it.

Except it bled pretty good. And it kept bleeding. It bled until we left for lunch, it bled in the car on the way to lunch, and it bled all through lunch. I soaked through three paper towels trying to eat without dripping gore all over my food. The cut was a quarter of an inch long, and it bled for an hour and a half before it finally stopped.

I still have the scar. I can show it to you, if you run into me some day. It's tiny, but it's mighty.

The only thing I regret about Sun Dragon is that it currently has no wildly profane ex-military instructors. Some may see this as an advantage, I suppose. Help us reach out to more people by donating $5 to our fundraiser!