An embarrassing first-grade February day

Note: The following story is a little bit gross, but hopefully in an amusing way.

I can remember one day in February 1996 when I was at recess. I'm not sure if I had had a cold, or if the cold weather was affecting me. Whatever the case was, I had a runny nose.

But when I say "runny," I don't mean the kind in which the mucus is almost like water so that it drips out of your nose. I mean the kind where it is thick and gloopy and yellowish-greenish.

(Interesting side note: I just learned that mucus is the noun form, while mucous is the adjective form. I had no idea!)

Anyway, I was down on the field with two female friends, Destani Mata and I don't remember who else. I had a runny nose, and apparently I didn't have a tissue, because the snot was just hanging out of my nose.


The bell rang, so we went up to go back in. But since it was February, there was a layer of snow on the ground, just slippery enough to make it difficult to walk up the grassy hill portion of the field. We tried to walk up, but we kept slipping back, while the boogers hanging from my face kept getting longer and longer.

Eventually we made it up the hill, but all the other kids had already made it inside, so my friends and I had to hurry up to get back to class. As we ascended the concrete steps at the entrance of the school (steps that have since been demolished and replaced), I stooped down to see if I could wipe the dangling snot off on the ground. Destani said to me, "Come on!" But as I lifted my head, I was dismayed to find that the boogers were so deep in my nasal cavity that when I lifted my head, the dangling portion would not break off and stick to the ground as I had hoped.

So I walked into the school with large "noodles" dangling out of my nose, my hand under my nose in case they fell off.

That is what I looked like as I walked into my first grade classroom. Since we were late, the whole class was already seated and the teacher was giving a lecture. I had to walk across the front of the room in order to grab a tissue from the tissue box. "Ewww!" was the response I heard from my class as I walked across the room.

The class policy was that anyone who was late from recess would have their name written on the board and they would have to stay in for afternoon recess.

I don't think I had ever been late from recess before. When afternoon recess rolled around, I was actually content to stay in, because it would give me more time to work on my Presidents' Day art project. (That's how I know this was in February.) I think the policy might have been that you actually had to put your head down and not do anything, but I didn't know that. My teacher, Mrs. Taylor, came over to me and asked me why I had been late. She seemed annoyed, maybe because I wasn't supposed to be working on the project. I explained to her how we tried to come up the hill but kept slipping. I know that seems like an unlikely excuse, but it was true. Mrs. Taylor accepted my explanation and told me to go outside. I'm not sure whether she thought it a reasonable reason, or whether she just knew I had a good track record of being on time, or whether she just didn't want any kids in the room that recess. I was a little disappointed to go out to recess, because I worried I wouldn't finish my art project.

That day, my friends David Christensen and Kennie Christiansen came over after school. We were in my bedroom, and they were discussing my moment from earlier in the day. David started exhaling so that the contents of his nose would come out, in imitation of me. Kennie told him that was gross.

I was surprised that David did that, because I thought of him as a fine, moral person. You see, back then I didn't realize that there were varying degrees was grossness; I thought that gross was gross. Now I know that some things are grosser than others. There's unchastity gross, bathroom gross, and all sorts of grossness. Snot is only a little bit grosser than earwax or those particles you rub out of your eyes when you wake up.

Which is why I can devote a whole post to that kind of grossness.