* * Pondering the new mole

I found a mole on my scalp.
It’s not something we tend to think about very much, but we have one body each – no more, no less.  And within it we have a brain, which provides the personality, the intellect, and the “soul.”  A functioning body and a functioning mind are necessary for a functional being. Neither lasts indefinitely.
Sometimes the mind goes first.  
What’s so maddening about diseases like Alzheimer’s is that while the body still functions, the brain dissolves from within, like termites through old wood.  
With diseases like Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease), the brain still does fine, but the body’s muscles stop receiving signals from the brain.  With no instructions to do anything, the muscles atrophy, typically starting with the extremities but eventually the muscles that control breathing and digestion.
I’ve always felt good about my body.  Certainly there are parts I like better than others.  My legs and arms are stubby and I’m not the athlete I’d like to be.  I’m typically the last person to reach the top of the hill when hiking or bicycling.  My face will never grace the cover of GQ and my hair is rapidly thinning in male pattern baldness. But my skin has always been my friend.  It is generally free of excessive wrinkles, moles, or even freckles.  It heals quickly when I damage it. I like the impression, “He is comfortable in his skin.”
I’ve tried to be a good keeper of my body.  Sure, I do some physically near-reckless things, like bicycling and motorcycling.  But I gave up consumptive vices decades ago. I try to breathe clean air, consume healthy food, and drink clean water. Someday, regardless of any best efforts, either the mind or body or both will begin to break down.  That’s what aging is all about.
But as I said, I found a mole.  It reared its ugliness at the top of my head. And it came on quickly.  One day I was brushing my hand across my scalp and there it was.  Jane said she didn’t see anything when she cut my hair last, a few months ago.  Sometimes a mole can be the harbinger of evil, unhealthy things.
I have had several friends who within the past year or two have contracted cancer.  One of them, Bob McGraw of Tazewell, died last year of melanoma, skin cancer. Cancer seems like that awful thing that attacks internal organs, not the thin film of an organ that is the skin.  In my mental image, one day a body is free from cancer and the next day it isn’t.  Certainly there are things like smoking that make cancer more likely, but the thing that triggers it seems arbitrary.
Last summer I shared a campsite with a friend and one of his friends who happened to be a retired laboratory oncologist. It was his job to analyze the things surgeons sent to him that had been removed from patients’ bodies.  He would determine whether they were benign or malignant.  He told me, “One day I had lunch at the hospital with a doctor friend.  After lunch, he wasn’t feeling well, so he spoke with another surgeon about his symptoms.  Within two hours, he was on the operating table.  The tissue specimen they sent me was malignant.  Within six weeks, he was dead.”
This morning, in a driving snowstorm, I went to a dermatologist.  He numbed my scalp and sliced off my mole with a razor blade.
This moment, as I type, snow is turning to sleet.  My scalp aches mildly where the local numbing chemical begins to wear off.  And a lab tech is determining whether the small mass of my mole is kind or malevolent, and whether its presence will quickly fade to afterthought or whether it will portend a shortened life of misery and uncertainty.