Several years ago, my friend, Jim, and I were waiting for an airplane and noticed the large number of people talking on their cell phones. We understood that we were witnessing the beginning of a revolutionary, societal change. Ruth and I took our grandson, Brady, to California for the past few days and everywhere we went during our travels we witnessed dozens of kids playing with electronic devices. This observation struck a chord with me and made me long for a simpler time from my youth.
One afternoon when I was about five, my mom spent what I thought to be a very large amount of time on the telephone. As I learned as I got older, we had a party line which meant other people shared the same telephone line as our family. Party lines were designed to get on and get off. To pass on information or ask simple questions. They were not designed for long conversations and on this particular day my mom had a loooong conversation.
When she got off of the hallway phone, she went to the kitchen. I spent much of my time in the kitchen while she talked in the hallway. There was an empty jar of mustard on the counter, and she noted that a large portion of the cardboard underside of the lid had been torn off and was missing. You know the thin, waxy, underside of the lid that’s 
installed to help ensure freshness. Well, it was no longer necessary because the jar was empty. For some reason that escapes me still today, I decided to tear off pieces of the underside lid, roll them up into little compact tubes, and shove them up my nose.
As a seventy-one-year-old man I can rationalize that I was just a curious five-year old trying “to go where no man had gone before”, but I expect that the truth of the matter is that I was just bored. Perhaps, if I would have had an electronic device to fill my time, I wouldn’t have undertaken an exploration of the human anatomy of this magnitude. In any case, the miniature cardboard tubes were lodged firmly in my nasal passage and nothing that Mom or I did could dislodge them.
She tried to make me sneeze, reached for them with her fingers and then tweezers, but nothing worked. Knowing what I know now about cardboard, and its propensity to expand when it becomes wet with snot (even if one side is waxy), I probably wouldn’t have conducted my experiment. We needed help.
Dad was at work, and Mom didn’t drive yet, so we went across the street to seek help from our neighbor, Polly. No dice. She failed just as we had failed. We had no choice but to wait until somebody’s dad got home from work so that he could take Mom and me to a doctor. Polly’s husband, Andy, was the best bet because he worked in an office and had “regular hours”. Most of the other dads worked in factories and sometimes worked overtime or drove a truck like my dad and got home whenever the day’s work was done. As expected, Andy came home first and before he could get out of the car, we were on our way to downtown Royal Oak. I’m sure that if my medical issue was more life threatening, Mom would have found a way to seek help more quickly. For me, the life-threatening part would come later after my dad got home.
If my memory is correct, we went to a medical facility that was the precursor to William Beaumont Hospital. The building was located on Washington Street. Mom, Andy, and I all met with the doctor. After looking up my nose with a search light similar to the ones used during the second world war to light up the skies over England, or for grand openings of new stores in Royal Oak, the doctor had me lie back on the examination table.
He took out the longest pair of tweezers that I had ever seen. He asked mom to help hold my hands down to my side, and had Andy rest the heavy end of the tweezers on his shoulder, while the doctor placed and pinched the teeny, tiny, end in my nose. Ever so carefully, the doctor retrieved piece after piece of waxy, snot covered cardboard. After he thought he had retrieved everything, he brought out the search light again, had me open my mouth wide, and made shadow puppets on the wall as the light reflected off the roof of my mouth. Mission accomplished.
We got back into the car and returned home. I did my best to not draw attention to myself for the remainder of the afternoon. When I saw Dad pull into the driveway, I hid behind the couch and waited. After he came in the back door, I could hear quiet conversation coming from the kitchen but couldn’t determine what was being said. Mom and Dad remained in the kitchen for a long time. I didn’t move from my secure position behind the couch and hoped that whatever was about to happen would just happen and get over as quickly as possible.
That’s the last thing I remember. I don’t know what Dad said to me, if anything. I know that he didn’t kill me as I expected that he might because I’ve lived to tell this tale.