The Unseen Here and
Now . . .
Stuart
Revercomb
Stuart
Revercomb is a marketing consultant and joyously married father of four
children. He seems to remember someone once telling him he ought to be
a writer. "The Unseen Here and Now" -- Thursdays.
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"Thursday's Fare"
The Nose Knows ...
"And God said, let there be noses ..."
Why? Of all the tools he felt compelled to give us, why the nose?
Kind of hard to get around a nose. There it sits predominant and imposing smack dab in the middle of your face. For those of us with more prominent proboscises who discovered somewhere in our sensitive teen years that ours were large or otherwise different in some way, there was, thankfully I suppose, little we could do about it.
One quick look in the mirror and you knew mom's little makeup tricks, which might hide the occasional pimple on a promising date, weren't going to do anything here.
"There's no powdering that sucker away."
Thankfully there are very few perfect ones out there. Recent observations indicate that the odds of having a perfect nose are about 1 in 50, and even then a perfectly shaped nose comes with all the baggage of the more imperfect variety. They drip, they snore, they turn embarrassingly red. Nose maintenance can be extremely costly. Did you know that last year Americans spent $42 million on nose-related health products? Of course you didn't -- because I just made that up, but it sounds like one of those believable figures you hear on AM radio, doesn't it?
Heck, it might be a low number.
According to legend, a poor reindeer named Rudolph was excommunicated for the lack of a proper one -- unable to play, as the story goes, in any more "reindeer games." Pretty darn cruel if you ask me, but such can be the price of an improper nose. Ultimately Rudolph was able to parlay his extraordinary schnoz into something useful -- much like Jimmy Durante, who turned the liability of his gargantuan nose into a trademark. But such feats are the exception.
The nose also often acts as an inconvenient on/off switch. If you want to shut someone down for a period of five minutes to several days, just sock them as hard as you can right on that big button in the middle of their face. Nothing -- I tell you nothing -- hurts as much as a good lick to the nose. I've had reconstructive knee surgery and I can tell you it was child's play compared to the time I slipped on the side of a pool at age 9 and landed on my nose.
Between the blood, the pain and the swollen black eyes, I felt I had learned the reason for the no-running rule. The sentence seemed stiff for the crime, but I can assure you I was never whistled for that violation again.
Noses do have a mission in life which is, of course, to smell. From a survival standpoint it is probably the least necessary of the five senses. If I'm out in the woods fending for myself against the cruelties of the world, I imagine I could survive indefinitely without my olfactory senses on line. Take away my sight and I figure I'm good for about 12-24 hours before I walk off a cliff or get eaten by a bear. Take my ears and maybe you can add a day or two before the same bear sneaks up on me.
One could probably survive the loss of the senses of touch and taste as well, but who wants to live in a world where you can neither feel what's around you or taste the food you eat -- provided you could find any at all. Truth be known I could probably be released into the wild with all my faculties and the full gear of a U.S. Marine and still not make it to night fall.
But the noble old nose may be worth it in the end, for science tells us that our deepest and strongest memories are brought forth by our sense of smell. I believe this wholeheartedly as I was recently transported by a whiff of our Christmas tree to 1966, where I found myself in a small den in Greensboro, N.C. I was holding a gray and white Bugs Bunny in my hand that at the pull of a white plastic ring on its belly would say, "What's Up Doc?"
But this wasn't the most remarkable part. That occurred when in the midst of this memory came the sense of what it felt like to be so overwhelmed as a child by the sheer extravagance of Christmas.
For one fleeting moment I found myself so strongly and intensely immersed in the euphoric and effervescent world of a 5-year-old that I was, at that moment, the same age once again. I was filled with mystery and magic and what was an almost divine sense of unlimited possibility.
There was a voice-like whisper that said, " ... anything's possible ... anything's possible ..."
I closed my eyes and was swept away by the glory of the thing, finding my way back only when my 3-year-old daughter tugged at my sleeve. Her eyes were twinkling like the lights on the tree and her smile was wide in anticipation of the wondrous morning now only days away. She wrinkled up her little nose (so unlike her father's), and said, "time for dinner, Daddy."
I exhaled and took in deeply the pine-laden scent that had taken me so far back and away to my childhood. I studied Janie's face a moment longer, and pondered the present-day joy of beholding her own sense of wonder.
"Next time," I thought, "perhaps it will bring me back here."