On Day 7 of #28ChineseMemories, I mentioned how I wore dress shoes a lot when I was a child. These were the only kinds of shoes I really liked, but (before I twisted my ankle), I quickly learned that these shoes weren’t the safest for me to wear.
There were times when I would walk around in my dress shoes in my grandparents’ backyard, which had a paved sidewalk leading up to a concrete platform; all of this was surrounded by lush greenery, and later, my grandparents converted the green area into a large vegetable garden. I would walk or run in the backyard with these shoes on, being a typical little kid.
A couple of times, I fell in the backyard and hit my nose those times. Of course I’d cry and run back inside to get my nose taken care of by an adult. Somehow though, those falls caused my nose to become a running faucet throughout my adolescence…
…because my nose would randomly start to bleed out of nowhere: it happened when I was at home and at school. I felt so embarrassed when my nose started bleeding in school because oftentimes these moments would last awhile and I’d freak my classmates out. I remember my fourth-grade teacher coaching me through how to take care of the nosebleed properly: don’t tip your head back, but lean forward while holding a tissue around your nose.
The worse time was in high school Spanish class, when I was having a one-on-one practice conversation with my classmate and my nose kept bleeding. Finally, I had to excuse myself to the bathroom and later had to clean the desktop off.
Strangely enough, my nosebleed moments stopped after high school, as I don’t recollect any more of these incidents happening in college up to the present. Maybe the curse of the dress shoes wore off?