My Fathers Curlers

Dad was a bald man. Not entirely ping-pong ball bald, mind you. He sported an unseeming comb over.  Never admitting to be folicly challenged, he was the only one in the family who was aloud to make any bald jokes. Pride forced my father to sport a year round tan to distract from his lack of hair. He was a master at jaunty-angle hat wearing. I can't fathom him ever having any locks. We had one blurry picture were supposedly he had hair. I think it was just a shadow.

My Mum was the equallant of a Nordic Jackie Kennedy. Beautiful in an unpretentious type of way. An accident in her childhood caused her to lose most of her hearing. She would ineffectively try to read lips to understand our conversations. This caused most our dialog to be utterly chaotic.  But we never referred to her as deaf, our Mum was hard of hearing.

I was raised on a farm in the northern most part of the state. Dad worked outside the farm, Mum took care of the house and kids. In my most vivid memorys, Mum was always wearing curlers. Not the little soft  pink spongy ones. The hard bristle ones with teeth that would bite you in the head. My sister would have to cut those beasts out of my tangles if I tried setting my hair with them. Shortly after breakfast they would appear in Mum's head. They were her uniform as she whent about her housework. Easy to spot when she was out in the garden. Seldom did she try covering them up. No jaunty scarves were used to hid them when she did go into town. Isolated as we were, fashion and glamour where not top priority's to my Mum at that time.

Like clockwork though, every day when dinner was cooking on the stove at 5:00, Mum would sit down at her dressing table and  finally take out those tubular devices of torture. She would run a comb over her newly freed scalp. Or just tussle her curls with her fingers, right before Dad walked in the door home from work.  It was his ritual was to sit down at the dinner table close to Mum. Took me years to figure out who's curlers those were.