Darling Sylvia,

 In the boys’ dormitory at 501 Ottawa Street, Grayling, Michigan, a manly nose which recorded a history of past events was a family trademark to be treasured. I was taught by Joe and Johnny that we were rugged ugly and that pain was to be endured with stoic manliness. Tears would only invoke ridicule. As a result, I shed no tears when I broke my nose during my freshman year of football or when my nose met Chris Kroll’s elbow in 1963 during a basketball scrimmage between the JVs (me) and the Varsity (him). Copious blood but no tears followed. My previous experience when Dr. Blaha packed my first break made me decide to reset my own. The resulting pain and lack of skill in setting it helped convince me that botany and geology rather than medicine would become my eventual career path. The upper reaches of my nose carried a reminder of Chris that resembled the old ski jump at Hanson’s Hills.

In the Grayling dorm, our bodies were not considered temples but fortresses. My fortress served me without a care until the arrival in the mail at the age of fifty of my invitation to join ARRP. That invitation marked the first cracks in the walls of my fortress. At that very moment of the hated junk mail’s arrival, the first symptoms appeared that indicated that benign bilateral enlargement of my prostate was occurring. At fifty-eight, a cardiac syncope and a pacemaker destroyed the drawbridge entering into my fortress. At sixty-two, a plunge from our lake cottage balcony resulted in a smashed hip. The entire north wall of the fortress began to crumble. At sixty-three, a hernia in my groin was repaired by a robot inserted of all places through my belly button. That breached the south wall of my fort. At sixty-eight, in response to a chronic rosacea infection, the sebaceous tissue under the skin of my nose proliferated into benign growths (rhinophyma) that changed my face into the winner of the Freddy Kruger look-alike contest. It became obvious to everyone, except me, that something needed to be done. You took action on my behalf. This morning, I looked in the mirror; I have a new nose. It is still a manly big nose but it lacks the ski jump at the top. The tip and nares were given shape as a gift of the extra cartilage from Chris’s elbow. I think it is the first time since 1963 that so much air has entered my lungs via my nose. Sylvia, in 1969 you heard the part of the marriage vows dealing with sickness and health. Thank you for taking them seriously. I never would have thought that my nose was included. Unlike the kid who got his two front teeth for Christmas, I got a new nose

Love you,
Eddie Bert