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Lowcountry Riffs: The perils of pollen

Published Wednesday, April 07, 2010 4:04 PM

By Jim Tatum
The Gazette

Wow! What a change!

After all of these long and frigid winter months it’s nice to see flowers in bloom, brilliant emerald grass, hardy weeds strangling those delicate bulbs you so carefully planted and fought squirrels away from last year, and the all-encompassing and omnipresent layer of yellow powder covering every square inch of this planet and everything on it.

It’s spring in all its warm, sunny, sugar peeping, rheumy-eyed, nose-trickling glory -- and it’s about time.

Don’t get me wrong – all this beauty comes with a price. I come from a family of large running beezers and window rattling sneezers. Before you know it, I’ll be honking into tissues so often you won’t know if you’re hearing a head cold or a badly played herald trumpet.

“Big noses run in our family,” my dear old Pappy would say.

“How about a song,” I would reply and honk my beak into a square of toilet paper.

“Know any Miles Davis?” some family music lover might ask.

And yet, in a way I look forward to these moments of window rattling sinus misery – this year more than ever – because it means at long last, spring is finally here.

When I was but a whelp, or more specifically, a smart-mouthed, over-imbibing, Marlboro huffing, rebel-without-clue frat boy college putz, I loved winter weather. That’s because much of my life’s activities centered on the transport and consumption of mass quantities of cheap adult beverage, and nothing says party in the movie theater like a heavy winter jacket with lots of pockets. Add to the fact that five ski slopes were about a two-hour drive away from the Sociology class I had to cut to take advantage of mid-week early morning bargain lift tickets and you had a situation that would make me useless and my parents apoplectic.

“If you set your academic goals low enough, you can do what you want,” I would explain patiently, but alas my logic fell on deaf ears.

Winter was fun for me. For some reason, I hardly ever caught a winter cold, even when entire dormitories resonated with the phlegmy coughs and moiling snufflings of the damned. Spring, however, was another matter. Spring was the enemy.

When you’re that age, image is everything and nothing says “loser” with bold-faced, mile-high, gold-and-neon encrusted capital letters like a hanging string of heinousness dangling from either nostril in the middle of a world history lecture. Even if you think to bring a tissue or two, chances are you’ve long since saturated them. Your sniffling only brings more disgusted attention to yourself. You are truly in a sticky situation, pardon the pun.

The worst thing is when you try to stifle a monstrous, Class 5 Hurricane force sneeze only to find – once you’ve regained your senses from the ensuing concussion grenade-like explosion inside your eardrums – that you now have this offending wad of gory nastiness now cupped in the palm of your hand and at least 45 more minutes of Max Weber to endure.

What to do? You can’t wipe it on yourself -- the color and texture is far too vivid and viscous to effectively dissipate with a surreptitious swipe across a pants leg. No one will believe you’re suddenly digging in your pocket for a fresh pen – you’ve been there a half hour already. Any attempt to surreptitiously transfer it somewhere else, such as the bottom of a shoe, will invariably result in more disaster.

So you sit there, pretending to take notes with the wrong hand, staring straight down at a notebook page already full of mindless doodles as this hideous thing slowly congeals in your hand.

The best part? Everyone in the room -- including the hot girl sitting next to you and the professor himself -- knows exactly what cards you’re holding, so to speak.

Add a few hundred thousand loser points if you forget it’s there at the end of class and inadvertently reach out and grab the door handle, or worse, shake someone’s hand, like the hot girl sitting next to you.

Now I’m at that age where two important factors have kicked in. One, I have learned to plan ahead and two, I don’t really care about image any more.

I don’t know if that’s a benefit or a peril of aging, but it works.

So … how about a song?

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