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Written by: Christine
Louise Hohlbaum Date Submitted: 08/06/2003 |
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The nose is a wonderful organ. It sits in the middle of your face. It is the
helpmate to the lungs which pump life-sustaining oxygen into your blood. It
tells when you have a cold, allergy, or dislike for a specific fragrance. It
tells you when you need to take out the trash. The nose is a wonderous thing!
A soybean is also wonderful. It is round, healthy, full of protein without an
ounce of fat. Many people drink it in its liquid form. They mash it, curd it,
and call it tofu. A soybean is a wonderous thing!
Take these two dynamic things and put them together. That’s where the
problem begins. When I was four years old, I pushed a soybean up my nose so
far that my mother had to usher me to the emergency room to get it back out.
You see, dried soy beans are so smart. When they are wet, they expand. The
nose is a very, very wet place.
Having learned a life lesson at the tender age of four, I became rather
frightened during one of my daughter’s art projects. You see, she is also
four now and has gained a new appreciation for her nose.
She had been harping me for several days to buy some different colored
lentils. In one of her animal books, there was an art project in which you use
lentils to form a lizard. I was impressed with her interest in such an
involved art project at age four, and being the type to encourage women in
science, I diligently searched for a place to buy multicolored lentils near
our rural Bavarian village.
At long last, we could begin our art project. Using the wrong kind of glue and
paper, we soon realized that our lentils would not stick to the acid-free
paper we had purchased. The art project became uninteresting to my
four-year-old rather fast and in a blink of an eye, she had found a new way to
use the lentils. You guessed it! Up her nose!
A swift memory came rushing back to me. Lying on the emergency room table, a
youngish Japanese-American doctor hunched over me with pinchers. The first
smaller set didn’t work, so he had to get out the big guns. Out came one
very unappealing soy bean.
Back at the Bavarian village, I pleaded with my daughter to hold one nostril
(the unoffended one) and snort with all her might. Like a good little trooper,
she did as I requested. The legume shot across the table, and my daughter
resumed gluing the lentils on the paper as if nothing had ever happened!
Christine Louise Hohlbaum, author of Diary of a Mother: Parenting Stories and
Other Stuff, is an American living near Munich, Germany with her husband and
two children. Visit her web site at:
http://mypages.iparenting.com/webs/diaryofamother/diaryofamother.html
mail to: chohlbaum@smith.alumnae.net
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(c) 2003 Christine Louise Hohlbaum. All Rights Reserved