Goines On: Okie blows

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The morning after Mrs. Goines read to him from The Dreamt Land (which is about the state of water in California), Goines knew what to call them when he had applied a thumb to each nostril and blown his nose: Okie blows.
    He was out back taking up their now-unused rock light fixtures and collecting them in the utility corner to await their deciding where to create a sort of museum, or “rock light plaza,” when he simply had to blow his nose. Using a thumb was by far the most convenient way to accomplish it.
    Goines now wondered whether Garrison Keillor picked up the Okie blow when doing his Lake Wobegon show somewhere in the San Joaquin Valley? For Goines was sure that Keillor had once reported blowing his own nose that way, and he made it sound common among his neighbors around the lake....That “Okie” business was probably just regional. Using one’s thumb to blow one’s nose was probably a world-wide phenomenon.
    Vladimir Putin probably even blew his nose that way...if no beholden oligarch was handy to hold a nose rag to his face. Or would a grand ruler like Putin have them use something fancier – a “nosegay” perhaps?
    What was a nosegay, anyway? Goines seemed to remember hearing it talked about only in women’s circles, in one of those British dramatizations he and Mrs. Goines liked to watch on Masterpiece Theater.
    He looked it up when he came in from gardening: “nosegay – a small bunch of flowers, typically one that is sweet-scented.”
    Goines hoped Putin sneezed whenever an oligarch tried that.

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