Catholic Schmatholic

I have a deviated septum. I’m pretty sure I got it when I was walking home from St. George Catholic school almost fifty years ago. There was a kid from Bert Fulton public school walking past me in the opposite direction and when he went by he said “Catholic Schmatholic”. I have no idea what that means, then or now, but I did know he meant it as an insult. So I did what any eight year old would do, I turned around and yelled back “public schmublic”. Once again, I have no idea what it meant but it proved that I was a master of the witty comeback. We kept moving further apart, walking backwards, yelling equally pithy insults about our respective religions at each other. At the time I didn’t know that the kids who went to public school weren’t members of the ‘Public’ religion. I figured each religion had its own school, Catholics, Lutherans,Methodists, and Publics. It made sense to an eight year old. When we were almost a block apart and the insults were nothing more than faint, distant, nonsensical gibberish, I felt it was safe to turn around and go on my way. Having stood up for the religion my parents had chosen for me, I was sure God and Jesus were proud of me. As I turned around, a tree that I apparently had been walking backwards towards, met my nose and face with a force that knocked me on my ass. With blood and snot gushing from my nose I made my way home realizing that God and Jesus really didn’t give a crap if somebody made fun of the Catholic Church.

In those days parents didn’t coddle children and rush them to the emergency room for every little bump and scrape. To my mom the fact that blood was squirting out of my nose, and I had the perfect imprint of a tree trunk from my chin to my forehead, didn’t seem to bother her. She put some mercurochrome on my face and told me to “walk it off”. That is why to this day, even though it’s not apparent looking at me, inside my nose the septum actually does a right turn. This causes me to have a very hard time breathing at night. To rectify this I started using Breathe Right nasal strips when I go to bed. These are the strips that you stick on the outside of your nose and they pull your nostrils open for better air flow. They work so well, and stick so tightly that yesterday, when I pulled it off in the morning, the skin came with it. This has resulted in giving me a really nasty appearance and it caused quite a bit of pain. But I'll be alright,I'll just walk it off.