He blew his nose

Althouse writes about Obama blowing his nose and actually getting applause from the crowd and newspaper articles about it (and blog posts too, I guess).

I don't really have anything to say about it other than I got praise for blowing my nose once.

It was when I was a kid, probably about 8 or so. I think 8 is right, I think I was in the third grade. I was a narrator for the Christmas pageant at our family's church. I stood up in the pulpit giving a memorized script as other kids acted out virgin child birth in the background. They had a little wooden step ladder for me to stand on so my head would poke out above the pulpit.

I had a cold and runny nose. Before I went up to the pulpit my mother game me a fresh handkerchief. It had little roses on the corners. A woman's handkerchief. Very feminine. About half way through the presentation I needed to blow my nose. I couldn't pull out this woman's handkerchief in front of this crowd of people. I was a boy, not just a boy but a Texas boy. That clearly just wasn't going to work. But snot rolling down to my upper lip wasn't going to work either.

So I hit on the solution. During the birth contractions of play I figured no one would be watching me and I stepped down so that I was hidden by the pulpit and used my momma's handkerchief to blow my nose. I didn't realize how sensitive the mic was though.

Anyway, my grandmother had been in the crowd. This was a big deal since our church was Lutheran and my grandmother was a West Texas Methodist. For her to go to a Liberal Lutheran church was a pretty big deal.

After the event my grandmother told me how proud she was of me for being so grown up and going out of my way to hide the snot from the crowd by stepping out of sight when I blew my nose.

Until she said that it hadn't occured to me that it might be rude to blow my nose publically, I was just hiding the shame of having a woman's handkerchief.

Note: The spell check is broken on my blogspot and I wasn't sure about the spelling of handkerchief. I thought I knew how to spell it, but I wasn't sure about the ie or ei in chief. I never can get that stuff right. So I put the word in my word processor to check it and discovered that I not only didn't know how to spell the word, I guess I can't pronounce it either. I had thought it was hankerchief.