The raisin incident

After reading more hyperboleandahalf well in to the night, I discovered that I am interested in blogs that tell long, embellished real-life stories & thought I might have a go at it. Now that MaryAnne (mother) knows this blog exists, might as well give her a good laugh.

I must have been three or four years old when I really started to discover the magic of my nose. A strange place where I could find nose hair, wet booger, dry booger & the likes.

I'll be the first to admit that I was a nose-picker. I think all children were. To me, it feels like a progression of natural human curiosity to get to know a part of yourself you couldn't see. Even now as an adult I think most people who buy those mirrors on a stick from the dentist office care much less about the hygienic benefits, but more so want to see whats going on back there by their molars. That's natural.

MaryAnne was a nurse working overnight shifts at the hospital close by (The hospital's name is the translation for 'mercy' in another language-gives you a lot of faith huh?). We would usually drive her there at about 7:30pm where I would be reminded that bed time is 10:00 o'clock & to be good.
However by the time we got back home (give or take 7:45), I'd be left with over two hours with very little supervision from my dad being the trusting person that he was & having no experience with children before me.

My father owned a home business & was left in charge of me when MaryAnne was at work or sleeping during the day. He might smite me for saying so, but he was clueless about children & specifically about little girls.  I was not his 'little princess'.

He made me snowmobile stands for Christmas & bought me Nascar shirts sponsored by Budweiser for my birthday.
We'd go fishing, eat pizza at establishments I'm sure I shouldn't have been in late at night & I'm confident the first time he let me drive I couldn't see over the dashboard.
All that is irrelevant to the raisin incident but it might give you some understanding to how I believe my father was confused & maybe scared of me in the first place.

That night after MaryAnne had been dropped off. Dad's Biker Buddy came over (dad didn't have a motorcycle-but this friend cannot be described in any other way. 6 foot, 350 lbs, long hair in a ponytail, must be wearing at least one piece of Harley Davidson clothing at all times...).
If dad didn't know how to have a little girl, Biker Buddy had certainly no idea how to act around someone's daughter.
I'm told that he used to curse like a sailor but as soon as I started to talk, he would not utter a single word when I entered a room out of fear that he'd let one slip. On a side note, I am extremely thank-full that Biker Buddy was in my life. Being around Biker Buddy taught me to not be afraid of the people on the fringes of society & to not be misled by appearances. Biker Buddy & his family provided much emotional support to me after dad's passing, but I'll leave that for another day.

As so often would happen, dad & Biker Buddy would be in the living room talking about whatever grown men talked about in the early nineties & I would do whatever I felt like. Today i felt like eating one of those little red boxes of raisins you get at Halloween & watching movies in MaryAnne & dad's room.

What are people thinking on Halloween giving out boxes of raisins? We kids didn't want little pellets of dried fruit, we wanted to chips & candy corns & chocolate bars! It's an atrocity! That's it, I've convinced myself, this year all the kids that come to my door get prunes! Can you imagine? Kids parent's would be sending in letters to the editors about that freak & her husband in the yellow house giving out compost-matter!

As I was eating the raisins & realising that they really weren't any good, I started to pick my nose.
Yes, looking back, eating & picking simultaneously is pretty gross...I don't think I would do it again.
From there, I got the phenomenal idea to really test out how big my nostril was, I stuck in a small raisin. I don't know why but this prospect was really entertaining to me. I could sneak around the house all the while knowing that I had a concealed fruit in my nose & no one would be the wiser.
I pulled that raisin out & DID NOT eat it (I can't remember if i put it in the garbage or fed it to the dog. Poor dog). I repeated the raising in nose process a few more times which is what is really mind boggling to me.
I distinctly remember knowing that if dad & MaryAnne knew, they would be mad, but I couldn't stop doing it, the raisins getting bigger & bigger until...oh figs... the big raisin wasn't coming out.

Telling poor dad & embarrassing him in front of Biker Buddy was believe it or not, not my first choice. I sat there for what seemed like forever trying to pick it out, but I was only succeeding in pushing it further in with the tips of my useless, small-child fingers. I started to panic. I think I started to cry at which point, well now's a good a time as any to go out & tell dad.

Remember this was a while back, so the details of his reaction are a bit foggy. He did not yell or cuss as I might have expected his reaction to be. He lifted me over his knee to look inside my nose where the raisin still sat up there by my eyeball. He & Biker Buddy conferred for a moment...then they call MaryAnne.

I'm not too sure what MaryAnne suggested. What I do know is that once the call was completed, dad was on me trying to get my jacket on, telling me that we were going to the hospital. THE HOSPITAL? Ahhhhh hell no! Yeah, that's a real medical emergency there PARENTS. What a rookie call. Just saying, if Mr. Ford & I ever have kids & they stick things up their nose, I'm gonna be the 'lets just wait it out' parent. The way I see it, there's no point calling in the national guard because a soft piece of fruit is in a child's nose.

What I'm getting at is i felt the same way back then as & do now. I wasn't going to no hospital & I told dad that as I went & hid under the bed.
That being the case, dad got back on the phone with MaryAnne, who in turn went to her boss & told her she had to go home...because her daughter crammed something up her nose & it got stuck.

Now I know you all are worried that the raising somehow got up my nostril, in to my brain & caused me to have half of my face amputated, but MaryAnne came home & picked the raisin out of my nose, piece by piece with some tweezers, the rest came out when she held a Kleenex to my face & instructed me to blow.

Two lessons to learn from this experience:

1. Parents, calm the eff down, they're not going to die. You are the cause for hospitals being over-crowded & people dying in waiting rooms. Learn to be a Google doctor because I can all but guarantee that your kid is not the first to do anything. To prove my point, here is a link to the most common 'nose ingestibles' for kids. Raisins isn't on there by the way...I must be a super-smart & creative toddler genius.

2. Nothing should go in your nose besides your fingers.