Bead Brain

I've loved beads for as long as I can remember.  I know, huge shock right?  I don't know where the obsession started, but for a vague memory of going to the bead shop in Yonkers with my grandmother when I was about 4.  She worked there, sewing beads and sequins onto gowns that were sold in the boutiques in Manhattan.  At her apartment, she always had a couple of cookie tins full of beads and sequins, which I always begged to see and play with and she was only happy to oblige.

I have no memory of this, but my mom likes to tell the story of when I shoved a bunch of beads up my nose. I must've been 2 or 3.  One was stuck but good, up by the bridge of my nose.  Right then, the refuse company showed up to get the trash from our house.  The woman driving the truck had a whole passel of kids herself, so mom darted outside to ask for her help.  But all she could advise was to just keep working it down from the outside instead of trying to use tweezers up my nostril.  Mom said she finally got that bead out.

Many years later, when I was at Channel 56 in the late 80s, I went to see an allergist, who took a bunch of xrays of my sinuses.  He told me that one cause of my constant stuffy nostril on that side could be the small bone spur that was in my sinus.  I didn't think anything of it.  A few years later I mentioned it to Brian and he knew the story of the beads up my nose.  He wondered if it was possible that the bone spur was actually a bead that calcified over.  

I'd like to think that it is and that it's the source of my creativity.