Beech Tree News Network

My nose is getting bigger.  I noticed it a couple of weeks ago when one of my friends took a selfie of the two of us together.  I’ve always expected my nose to get bigger, but it snuck up on me sooner than I expected.  I’ve never been obsessed with my appearance, and I don’t plan on having plastic surgery, unless I’m in a disfiguring accident or something like that.  My Grandma Mattingly was small like I am, and her nose seemed to grow too big for her face before she passed; also, near the end of his life, my dad had certain glasses he refused to drink out of because they bumped his nose every time he took a sip.  Noses tend to be genetic, so I figure I’d better start shopping for drinking glasses with big rims.
    I read somewhere—I don’t remember where or even when—that your nose stops growing by age twenty, but the changes in cartilage and bone and the thickening of the skin on your nose can cause it to droop as you age, and it just appears larger.  One of the contributing factors to noses drooping is allergies and the constant blowing and rubbing you do when you have allergies. If that’s true, my nose will be somewhere down around my chin by the time I’m seventy, because I’ve had allergies all of my life, and I’m always blowing or rubbing my nose.
    From the age of five until a short time after the age of twelve, I had nose bleeds on a daily basis. My childhood consisted of ice packs, cold compresses and one time, even a pair of frozen metal scissors laid at the base of my neck.  Occasionally, the teachers would call my stepmom from school if they couldn’t get my nose to stop bleeding, but she didn’t have a car, so she couldn’t come get me.  The teacher and some high school student would keep applying direct pressure to my nose until the blood clotted and the bleeding stopped.
    There were suggestions that I might need to have my tonsils and adenoids removed, but we weren’t the kind of family who had their tonsils and adenoids removed.  When I was about twelve and a half, the nose bleeds stopped and allergies took their place.
    Both our daughters have Garey’s nose.  He got his nose from his mom, Aggie.  I took a picture of Aggie and our granddaughter, Sabria, one day about three years ago.  They were sitting on the couch with their faces turned slightly to the left.  I thought it was a wonderful picture, so I framed it and gave it to Aggie for Christmas.  She was horrified.
    “Is my nose really that big!” she said, “That’s just ugly!”
    I assured her that her nose wasn’t really that big—whatever “that big” meant to her anyway.  Aggie took the picture and put it on a dresser in a guest room, where no visiting eyes could see it.
    I was looking through the Guinness book of world records on the internet recently, and I discovered that the person with the longest recorded nose was born in Turkey in 1949.  His name is Mehmet Ozyurek, and his nose is four and one-half inches long.  It was the strangest story. He is a celebrity in the small town where he lives, and there is a camera man who follows him around filming his every move.  It’s boring to watch, although strangely fascinating.
  I thought about showing the story of Mehmet Ozyurek to Aggie in order to make her feel better about her nose or maybe just downloading the guy’s picture and framing it then I could set it beside Aggie’s and Sabria’s picture on the guest room dresser.  I thought better of it when I considered the different times she has been unable to identify her own grandchildren in photos I’ve taken and shown her—it would really be bad if she mistook the Guinness guy’s nose for her own.  If she can live another ten years, I can set my own picture—the one of my nose drooping to my chin—on her guest room dresser.  That should silence any misgivings she has about her own nose.