A Cyrano de Bergerac Tale: Blame It on President Bush

I suppose I’m going to have to say what happened to my nose.

The damage isn’t going to go away in a few days, and already I have been besieged by questions.

“Whadja do t’yur nose?” There have been several variations, some of them humorous and some rude.

Obviously, there is going to be no end to it, and I might as well try to forestall this barrage by telling the true story.

What we are talking about is a large scab on the bridge of my nose from the eyes to the knob, or whatever it’s called. My nose, in fact, was skinned, or gouged, as if with a scraper, for almost its entire length. For several days it was a raw wound, but fortunately it has scabbed over. It is still disgusting but not shocking.

I can’t blame people for being curious. It is bound to excite curiosity. It is a strange wound. Some people politely pretend to ignore it, but they can’t hide their curiosity.

I can hear them asking themselves, “How the hell did he do that?”

It is not bashed. It is not broken. Actually, the best word to describe it is gouged .

I remember when I was a kid I broke an arm at school on the horizontal bar and it was put in a cast. I got so tired of the same old question--”Whadja do t’yur arm?”--that I began lying, just to amuse myself. I worked up a repertoire of improbable explanations that were almost always accepted as gospel. That taught me that people will believe almost anything but the truth.

Several times when people have asked me “Whadja do t’yur nose?” I have answered, “My wife hit me.”

To my embarrassment they believed me. Well, why not? It was simple and direct, and I imagine that most people assumed that she had reason.

I’m not saying she doesn’t often have reason, but people who know her know she would not strike me. Or most of them do. Or do they? How can I be so sure myself?

She can be a spitfire, but so far she has never used violence on me. Of course that may be because she would feel that she was abusing her physical inferior.

I have thought of saying I was drunk and ran into a concrete abutment. It might be plausible enough, but my wound does not fit with that kind of accident.

I might say that I was playing baseball with my grandchildren and the ball hit me in the nose. However, it is well known that I no longer engage in sports, even with my grandchildren, and, again, a baseball would tend to flatten one’s nose, not scrape or gouge it.

So there is, finally, nothing to do but tell the truth. I am aware that the truth may be harder to believe than any of the previous fabrications.

First, I must explain that I wear a pair of steel-rimmed eyeglasses.

I have never worn steel-rimmed glasses before; they were for older people. But the optometrist assured me they were not too old for me. He told me they were called Bushes because they were like those worn by President Bush. I did not vote for Bush, but I thought--what the heck--it wouldn’t hurt to wear glasses like those worn by the President of the United States.

One feature of the glasses is that the bridge is a thin steel bar curved like a scimitar. It is, in fact, a deadly weapon.

Now we come to the part of the story that may be hard to believe. I was standing in my bedroom trying to get into my shorts. I was standing on my left leg and trying to work my right leg through the right leg of my shorts. I am not a stork. I lost my balance, which I have a tendency to do.

You may wonder why I was wearing my glasses while putting on my shorts. I do not see too well, and my glasses are the second thing I put on after showering. I put my T-shirt on first so I won’t have to pull it over my glasses.

The rest is simple. I pitched to the floor like a board, face first, into the rug. My glasses were shoved down the length of my nose by the force of my fall, gouging the flesh like a snowplow.

At my cry, my wife came to my assistance. She washed my nose and applied a bandage and cleaned up the blood in the rug.

That’s my story. If you don’t believe it, you can believe any other story you like. I realize other stories may sound a lot more probable.

I’ll tell you one thing: I’ve bought my last pair of Bush glasses.