DON’T PICK YOUR NOSE!

“DON’T PICK YOUR NOSE!”

When I was a kid, I heard this all the time.  I heard it from my parents and the nuns and my friends.  I heard it in Polish and English, and I even heard it in Spanish from some neighbors.  

If you’ve ever picked your nose – and I’m sure you have – you’ll know it’s good advice because picking your nose will probably lead you down a dark, bloody street. That red stuff will come gushing out of your nose and down your chin and onto your shirt and your pants and the rug you’re standing on.  It will be one heck of a mess.

Why am I telling you this?  

It’s not because I’ve been picking my nose, but it is because I’ve recently had the worst nose bleed of my life.

Last Thursday night, I was talking to my wife Linda about our weekend plans.  She was suggesting we go to an art museum when my nose suddenly started bleeding.  I’m 76 years old, and I’ve had nose bleeds before.  I take a medicine called Eliquis for a vein problem I have.  One of its negative side effects is that I’m more susceptible to bleeding.  However, that didn’t bother me.   I knew what to do when the blood started coming.  I pinched my nose just below its bridge, and I held that pinch for 20 minutes.  Usually, this works.  It didn’t this time.    

No matter how hard I pinched my nose, the bleeding wouldn’t stop.  It didn’t stop after an hour, and it didn’t stop after 5 hours.   It kept dripping into the sink in fat, dark drops.

Linda said we had to go to the Emergency Room, and I knew she was right. I was losing too much blood.  We hopped into the car, and Linda drove to the hospital.  

All the while, I continued pinching my nose and worrying.  I’ve been to ERs before, and I knew what they were like.  The last time I was in an ER I was there because I had arthritis pain so bad that I couldn’t stand straight or move my arms without pain.  That time, I spent 8 hours waiting to see a doctor, and when I saw one, he advised me to see my regular doctor.

I was afraid this visit was going to be the same.

It wasn’t.

When I entered the emergency room, it was packed with people, but when I told the receptionist my nose had been bleeding for 5 hours, a doctor saw me almost immediately.  He said he had to put a nasal pack in my nose to stop the bleeding.  This pack was a tiny balloon covered by gauze.  He inserted it up my nose and inflated the balloon to exert pressure on the nasal blood vessels to stop them from bleeding.  

It worked!

For about 12 hours.  

Friday, I was in an urgent care seeing another doctor because somehow the balloon exerting pressure had gotten deflated and my nose was bleeding again.  He re-inflated the balloon. 

It worked!

For about 16 hours.

Saturday, I was back in the urgent care seeing the same doctor.  He determined the nasal pack was all screwed up, and he said he had to pull it out.

I said, “Please do!” My nose hadn’t been bleeding, but I’ve had pain from the moment I left the urgent care that first day.  The pressure of that nasal pack caused incredible pain in my nose, eyes, and head.  I felt like my body was swamped by migraines.  I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t rest, I couldn’t sleep. 

Taking the nasal pack out did the trick.  I spent the next day and a half sleeping, recovering from that pain.

Today, I saw another doctor for a follow-up visit.  

He was happy to hear I hadn’t bled for a couple of days and that I wasn’t experiencing any pain.

Smiling, I said, “I’m happy about that too.”

Smiling back, he said, “Let me give you one piece of advice.  Don’t pick your nose!” 

——

My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy.

My Books

My Books

I saw an article recently about the ten things that guys like to collect.  It was an interesting list because – for the most part – it was stuff I never considered collecting.  Here’s the list: Sports cards, coins, tools, knives, stamps, alcohol, car miniatures, figurines (stuff like action figures and pop icons), watches, and vinyl records.  

Some of these things I did collect for short periods in my life.  When I was a kid back in the 50s, I collected baseball cards one summer.  I also collected pennies for a while.  I tried to get one example of every penny minted between 1900 and 1962.  I was pretty successful.  I think I tracked down about 99 of the 150 different pennies minted in the US during those years.  I don’t know what happened to my baseball cards and the pennies.  Probably my mom swept them out of the house with a lot of the other stuff I dragged in.  

What I really love collecting are books! I’m 76 this year, and I’ve probably been collecting books for 69 years.  I’ve still got comic books I bought at Mandel’s soda shop and toy store on the corner of Potomac and Washtenaw back in 1957.  And those aren’t the only books I’ve still got.  

In my early teens, I became a crazy fan of science fiction novels, reading a sci fi book every couple of days, and then a little later I became a crazy fan of hard-boiled detective novels by writers like Mickey Spillane and Ross Macdonald, and then I became a crazier fan of the Beat writers like Kerouac and William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, and then I became a crazy fan of crazy postmodern novelists like Thomas Pynchon and John Barth, and then I became the biggest fan of great Polish writers like Milosz and Sienkiewicz and Szymborska and Isaac Bashevis Singer and so many others.

I not only read these authors I collected their books.

At one point, I had more than 4,000 books.

Some of these books I’ve been hauling around for almost 70 years.  I’ve still got books I bought in my teens and twenties at the Maxwell Street flea market, at dumpy book stores that were here today and gone tomorrow, at down and out second-hand stores in Chicago run by failed rabbis and fired university professors.  

Since I left Chicago in 1975 to go to graduate school in Indiana, I've hauled these books to 20 different apartments and houses my wife Linda and I have lived in.  I’ve hauled the books from Chicago to Lafayette, Indiana, to Normal, Illinois, to Charleston, Illinois, to Mobile, Alabama, to Peoria, Illinois, then back to Charleston, Illinois, and from there to Bowling Green, Kentucky, to Valdosta, Georgia to Danville, Virginia, and finally to Lynchburg, Virginia.  

Let me tell you, moving these books wasn’t ever easy.  One time when we moved from Mobile to Peoria we decided it was cheaper to mail the boxes of books rather than to rent a U-Haul truck that the 133 boxes of book would fit in.  This was back in the late 1980s and shipping a box of books cost about a buck fifty. 

At one point, just before we moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, where my wife Linda got a job as the director of the writing program at Western Kentucky University, she persuaded me to start downsizing my collection of books.  

I hated to do it, but I did it anyway.  At least a little.  

And what did I do with the books?

I gave a lot of my books to my students.  Every two or three days, I would fill a couple of boxes with books that I figured I would never read or need again, and I placed the books outside my office door.  By the next day, the boxes were empty.  I also gave boxes and boxes of the books by Polish writers along with the  academic journals I had collected over the years to my university library.   

At one point, I even sold some of the rarer books on Amazon and Ebay. 

Despite all of this, I still have too many books today, enough to fill 8, 6-foot tall bookcases. I’ve dropped from 133 boxes of books down to about 30.  

Mostly, the books I have left are the ones that meant the most to me, the books by authors who reflected who I was and shaped who I have become.   And I walk past these books every day, and I stop and sit in the room the bookcases are in, and I read a chapter or two from one of the books that have shaped me and remember how important these books are to me,  and I wonder what will happen to them when I’m gone.  

I know my wife and my daughter and granddaughter know how much these books mean to me, but I also know keeping them and cherishing them because of how they shaped me so many years ago isn’t going to happen.  Perhaps my wife and my daughter and granddaughter will each take a book or two, but the rest will go where old books go.

To libraries or garage sales or Goodwill industries.

A Poem for Holocaust Remembrance Day

 A Poem for International Holocaust Remembrance Day

On January 27, 1945, the Soviet army came upon Auschwitz and its various camps and subcamps.  

What they found was terrible.

Afraid of anyone seeing what they had been doing in Auschwitz, the Germans went on a killing spree before the arrival of the Russians.  They also tried to blow up the ovens where the murdered had been burned for years.  

When the Russians arrived, they found corpses and 7000 starving prisoners.

A conservative estimate is that 1,000,000 people died there.  Two of the them were my mother's aunts, Polish girls who married two Jewish boys.  

Here is a poem I wrote about Auschwitz.  It is based on an incident Tadeusz Borowski, a survivor of Auschwitz, describes in his memoir This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.  

I wrote the poem after a student at one of my readings asked me if I had one word for everything that happened in Auschwitz and the other German camps.  

The word was fear.

The poem appears in my book Echoes of Tattered Tongues, available from Amazon.  

Fear

During the war, there was only work and death.

The work broke you down, filled your stomach

with rocks and threw you in the river to drown.

The work shoved a bayonet up your ass

and twisted the blade till you were dead.

In the camps, there was only what we ate

and those we worked with—sometimes women.

But we never made love. I’ll tell you why.

Fear. I remember once a thousand men

were working a field with sticks, and trucks came

and dumped naked women in front of us.

Guards were whipping them to the ovens,

and the women screamed and cried to us, pleaded

with their arms stretched out—naked mothers,

daughters, and sisters, but not one man moved.

Not one. Fear will blind you, and tie you up

like nothing else. It’ll whisper, “Just stand still,

soon it will be over. Don’t worry, there’s nothing

you can do.” You will take this fear to the grave

with you. I can promise. And after the war,

it was the same. I saw things that were as bad

as what happened in the camps. I wish

I had had a gun there. I would have

pressed it here to my forehead, right here.

Better that than what I feel now. This fear.

—

The painting is by my friend Mieczyslaw Kasprzyk from his series of paintings of Dante’s Divine Comedy.