People who have been tested for COVID 19 describe the experience so vividly – the swab jammed high in the nearest nostril, sashayed about vigorously, and removed – that it’s put me once more in mind of a childhood experience I’ve been trying valiantly and futilely, for many long years to forget ….
Like so many of our more regrettable adventures in life, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
My little sister and I (five and seven, respectively) were making one of our infrequent, ill-fated efforts to play together. Her Barbies, my cowboys and G.I. Joes, our stuffed animals, assorted other playthings. My suggestion had been to set up a wagon train, and move the whole Toyland convoy into some high western adventure. She was grudgingly going along with the idea, on the naive assumption that, by doing so, she would earn the right to borrow one of my action figures for a day for a plot of her own devising.
After an hour of meticulous set-up, we were ready to ride the bedroom plains. “Wagons, HO!” a forward cowboy ventriloquized.
My sister giggled like she did everything else – irritatingly.
“What’s so funny?”
“’Wagons, HO!’ That sounds stupid.”
“It does not sound stupid. That’s what they said in the West to start the wagons.”
She rolled her eyes, but knew better than to question my knowledge of history.
I’d watched a lot more of Bonanza and The Big Valley than she had. I restarted the wagon train.
“Wagons, HO!”
More giggling. “Wagons, HO – ho, ho, ho!” She made it sound like something Josie And The Pussycats sang on Saturday morning.
That tore it. Arguing ensued, all trade deals were off, our mutual characters were rapidly assassinated, and then – somehow – she was holding up a tiny white sneaker. The preferred footwear of one of the Barbies. We fell to discussing its dimensions, and the subject eventually came around to … would that little shoe fit in my nose, or wouldn’t it?
My sister has, for several decades now, sworn on sundry Bibles that I am the one who posed that near fatal question. But I know what I know.
Unfortunately for her, everyone who ever knew us knows it, too. I have never in my life, since the moment I first cast eyes on her squirming, bassinetted figure, been able to talk my sister into anything. Whereas she devoted the best years of her limited childhood into leading me down an endless series of bright garden paths. Usually – as in this case – by the nose.
In the end, the double dare came down to: one shoe apiece, one nostril apiece, and one profound, perfectly synchronized, magnificently inhaled sniff.
“Dis fweels fwunny,” I said, a moment later.
“It hwuts,” she agreed.
We both drew back for some equally magnificent exhalation – snorting, sneezing, blowing for all our might. Nothing. Barbie’s soles had gone where other small items feared to tread. And they were thoroughly stuck.
Somewhere, down the hall, my parents were probably snuggling down into their living room armchairs and coming to their best guess of who the murderer was on Mannix, or cuddling on the couch, enjoying a little romance on NBC Tuesday Night At The Movies. We utterly destroyed all of that by hurtling into the room: moaning, groaning, blaming, snorting, squalling.
Each of us swore eternal vengeance on the one who’d gotten us into this. Each of grew fearful as our parents’ voices rose higher and higher with the frustration of not being able to poke, pry, massage, or coax the little shoes down. Tweezers were employed, to considerable pain and no avail.
I do believe I remember my mother, the nurse, saying something about what if they got up into our sinuses – or our brains? That sounded pretty horrific, indeed.
There was a hurried bundling up into coats, I remember, and a long, dark ride to the ER, punctuated by mother and dad each demanding with growing huff that the other explain why he or she ever, ever left their beloved, utterly untrustworthy children to play together alone.
They took us back in the ER separately, I remember, and as the oldest, I was volunteered first for what was clearly a suicide mission. A man in a long, white coat hoisted me up onto the examining table – tilted my head way, way back – then turned around for a moment to receive, from his pretty nurse, a … huge … glistening … four-foot long pair of tweezers. It looked longer and shinier than that fish my grandfather caught off the pier at Rockport the summer before.
I think I was just too stupefied at the sheer size of the thing to have time to react as the doctor sent it boring up into my post-nasal cavity. I can’t remember more – and don’t really want to. I certainly don’t care to imagine what the recovered doll shoe looked like, at that point.
What I do remember was being ushered out past my sister, whose bug-eyed imagination had already shot far, far out beyond the mere gi-normity of those soon-looming tweezers. I sat in the waiting lounge with Dad, licking my complimentary lollipop and listening to her soul-shattering cries of bloody murder. Patients all over the hospital were calling the switchboard to report savage tortures from the floor below.
My usual fraternal compassion failed me, I confess … paling beside the memory of who had gotten the two of us into this adventure in the first place. Besides, it was a good lollipop.
Three lessons, I’ve carried with me from that doll shoe debacle:
1) It’s a good thing, now and then, to doubt the word of people you’re inclined to trust.
2) As the Apostle Paul once so thoughtfully told the Corinthians, “All things are lawful to me, but not all things are helpful.”
3) There a few things, indeed, so sweet in life as being able to just breathe free.
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