Nosey

I worked an entire summer at a Jewish newspaper with the obituary writer who had a nasal deformity. He had this slender white growth coming out of his left nostril. It was repulsively distracting, yet incredibly curious to me. Not only didn’t he explain the gnarly growth, he never acknowledged it as if he didn’t know it was there.

I waited all summer and got nothing close to an explanation. I might have quit that job, but hung on figuring he would break in that steamy un-air-conditioned-musty-corner left to write obituaries on typewriters that were missing keys.

He was always a little uneasy about his position at the paper since his wife was Catholic. I used to see him nervously sneaking the Catholic Chronicle into his tattered back pack each week. Now I know I should have used that Catholic Chronicle as bait to blackmail him for the story on his nose. I guess I wasn’t cut out for investigative journalism.

A Pretend Life

Like most kids I was big into the world of pretend and make believe. I had imaginary friends called Imogene, Penelope, and Wilt. Also, there was a man living in a high rise apartment building underneath my tongue.

But sometimes as an adult I find myself still playing pretend. That the dust I find on the floor is sand and we are sunning ourselves at the beach. For a while I pretended our dust bunnies were alive and I couldn’t kill them with a mop because it was obviously cruel.

Other days I ignore the cell phone and computer because I am having a pretend 1950’s day. It helps to have a lot of vintage clothes, jewelry, handbags and, magazines.

Make believe isn’t any easier now than it was as a kid. People give me a hard time and try to reason about the difference between dust and sand. People show me calendars, wave ringing phones in my face.

They used to try to sit on poor Imogene and suffocate Wilt to prove some unknown point. And all the architects in the world couldn’t convince me that you can’t build a beautiful high rise under a child’s tongue.