Q-Tipped wreath stuck in classic Low-IQ Ear
But we do have medical emergencies.
(A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away)
Flashback Savannah, Georgia
My mother was a genius: she wrapped cotton balls on the end of toothpicks and used the resulting ‘swabs’ to clean my ears. When Johnson & Johnson began to sell Q-Tip™ swabs, I was certain that Mom would get a substantial cash payment. (I was wrong.) Over the years, I followed the product: the only innovation J&J made was to move from a rigid to a bendy stick.
In spite of the fact that wet and itchy ears are, of course, the Raison d'être for Q-Tip™ brand cotton swabs, I remember my Mom saying: “Now, Danny, never put anything smaller than your elbow into your ear.”
“But you put in my ear,” I thought.
End Flashback
LasTuesday, Nazy and I were shopping at the local CVS drug store. We needed Q-Tips. Nazy placed the brand-name swabs in the cart. And I removed them because..
“That company stole my mother’s idea.”
“Excuse me?” Nazy replied.
I ignored the question and put a generic and ₵heap brand in our basket. “These are a bargain.”
A few days later, I grabbed a no-name swab to dry my itchy ear. As I swabbed, the cotton lost cohesion with the stick and became (deeply) lodged in my outer ear canal.
Naturally, I turned to Nazy for assistance.
“What did your mother say about putting things in your ears?” Nazy asked. Predictably. Then she grudgingly grabbed a tweezer and a LED flashlight. “Real Q-Tip™ swabs don’t disintegrate so easily,” she explained. Unfortunately, she was not able to extract the offending cotton. So I did the brave thing:
“Can you call the doctor for an appointment? Don’t mention Q-tips.”
“Should I say that a cotton ball climbed into your ear while you were sleeping?”
“You could say that we have unusually fluffy towels and I was vigorously drying off after a shower. Or you could mention an unfortunate miscue involving belly button lint.” My protestations were in vain. I overheard Nazy on the call.
“... and he shoved a Q-tip up his ear...”
Flashback, Memphis Tennessee 1980
“You need to come home Dan,” Nazy explained, “to take Mitra to the doctor. She has a grapefruit seed stuck up her nose.”
“How did you let that happen?” I asked. Stupidly.
“She was at Montessori School and they were learning smells. They told Mitra to take a big sniff of a grapefruit. The rest is history.”
The doctor had the heavy equipment necessary to extract the seed.
End Flashback
The receptionist greeted me at the doctor’s office.
“Didn’t your mother tell you about ears and elbows?”
“Maybe I mixed that one up with birds and bees,” I replied.
They took my blood pressure which is always elevated at the doctor’s office. But, since I didn’t expect the test, my score was perfect. Naturally, I gloated. The nurse was not impressed.
“You’re the one with the Q-Tip in the ear, right? So: your blood pressure is low just like your IQ.”
The doctor used a water pump to bounce the swab off of my ear drum before extracting it with a tweezer. It was
“.... embarrassing,” i later explained to Nazy.
Earlier, on Valentine’s Day, Nazy and I decided to go to Ojai.
“Ojai?” I asked. “Is it pronounced like Ouija in ‘Ouija Board’?”
“No, Dan! It’s not even spelled that way.”
“So like ‘OJ’ like in ‘The Real Killer’”?
“Like ‘O Hi’ as in ‘Ohio’. You are so..”
“.... lovable.” I concluded.
We had a great dinner and enjoyed walking through the village. Nazy got a Spring/Summer door wreath made of live cactus plants.. well, you have to see it to understand.
Nazy and I have also been watching the Olympics We’re baffled by figure skating scoring. At least in the skiing events that feature jumping, twisting, turning and twirling, when you fall, your score is toast. In figure skating, you can stumble or fall and still get the gold. (If you’re from Russia and the games are in Russia.)
I prefer sports in which there is an objective way (i.e. ‘she was faster&rsquo
to determine the winner. Imagine the figure skating scoring system being used to rate writing:
“Well, Tara, He certainly seems to have command of his adverbs.”
“Indubitably, Johnny.”
“And, if you’ll forgive my digression, he had full mastery of the technical elements of sentence structure: the fluent use of vocabulary - intense and unexpected turns of phrase that includes all parts of speech in order to create a sentence that is impossible to diagram.”
“No one would want to diagram that sentence, Johnny. It’s ..”
“Did you read the flourishes? Lofty, impulsive juxtapositions of grandly overstated postulates surrounding stunning, beautiful, descriptive and wonderful turns of phrase.”
“But it lacks the simple beauty of the classics.”
“Classic?”
“Shakespeare: To be. Or not to be. That is the question.”
“I prefer McBeth, Johnny: Out damned spot.”
