How many years of childhood can pass without incident? Two? Five? Ten? What can be perceived as an incident? Does it have to be an extremely horrendous experience? Or can it be an extremely wonderful occurrence? If one was to look up incident in a thesaurus these synonyms would be listed: event, occurrence, occasion, happening, episode, thing, confrontation. Not in one place is it stated that an incident necessarily means an unpleasant incident.
So then why does a person associate pleasant incidents as something else entirely? Perhaps, it is because the concept, that the same word can be used for the day Cindy was first introduced to Kaylin and the day my father found a black ink-drop scar on my collarbone, is simply too difficult to comprehend. I myself have a difficult time wrapping my mind around the notion, although it is a simple thing.
Childhood can not pass without daily incident, for when you are a child everything is an incident. Each time you meet a friend it is an enchanting incident, every fall is a painful incident and all your frightening nightmares are terrible incidents that mom must kiss away with that special magic mothers have. Children rarely know or see how altering each occurrence is, and are ignorant of the effect those terrible and wonderful incidents have upon them. As adults, people look back and can see how entirely they were shaped by each incident that occurred.
As a person somewhere between childhood and adulthood, watching little ink-drop scars appear on my friend's collarbones, I have no time to think of such things. Yet I still can not help but wonder how the horrible incident of my scar appearing can share a term with the joyous incident of discovering that neither I nor my friends had actually contracted the disease.