Grandma Nina's Nose - Another Sappy Saturday Story

My maternal grandmother was a real character but unfortunately she was ashamed of this fact, she tried to keep her personality hidden under a barrell.  She came from the poor side of the tracks and didn't want anyone to know it.  She wanted to be liked and respected by what she considered the good people of the world and was afraid they would look down on her because of her family.  As hard as she tried to hide it, her tongue often gave her secret away.  My father always spoke highly of her.  He said it doesn't matter where you came from.  It is where you went from there.  Grandma taught school in a little one room country school for $40.00 a month.  She saved her paychecks to buy her parents a home and to buy herself a horse and buggy to drive back and forth to school.

My favorite story told by my grandmother was about her nose.  She hated her round pugged nose.  She once told me God must have been running low on noses when she was being made so he just took a little bit of hamburger meat and rolled it into a ball and slapped it on her face.

Grandma's story goes like this:  When Grandma was carrying my mother, the first of three little girls, she thought to mark her by holding on to Grandpa's straight skinny nose all night long throughout the pregnacy.  It worked, my mother had a skinny nose much like Bob Hope's famous nose.  Raising children is a lot of hard work, especially back then when there was no automatic washers and dryers.  With every baby she let loose of Grandpa's nose a little more and by the time the last baby came along, Virginia, she just didn't have the strength to hold on resulting in a little girl with a round pug nose just like her mother's.