THE OLD GREEN SWEATER


drawing board

Some things take on a life of their own. This is the way of my father’s old green sweater. He didn’t really wear it much at the end of his life, but I had thought it a would be a stylish addition to his wardrobe in his nursing home.

After he passed away, I draped it over the chair in my painting studio, reluctant to let him go. Though it is many sizes too large for me, I snuggle into the old green sweater in winter, feeling his presence once more.

corner wall studio

We tend to keep the important things in our lives close at hand. My studio is such a place of comfort. It is crowded with things from past, present and future. Doohickies and thingamaabobs crowd the walls and hang from the ceiling. One great granddaughter who was by nature a quiet and sensitive baby, screamed her lungs out each time I brought her into this room. Bad karma I guess, but for some reason she smiled happily when carried into the sculpting studio. I have no answer for this.

side wall studio

All I can say is that my spirits rise upon entering this overblown and overcrowded haven and I think my Dad would approve.

WOULDN’T YOU KNOW IT?


egypt-wig

I woke up a month or so ago and took a good look at my thinning hair and its effect on the wrinkles on my face. It was clearly a cry for help; namely another wig/hairpiece/style. There seems to be some sort of stigma attached to the wearing of a wig, so we will refer to it as a “style”. I have no idea why this disturbs some people. Celebrities obviously would never be caught dead in their own scraggly locks. Watching an old Lucille Ball show, Dr. Advice chirped “There! You can see she isn’t wearing a wig!” Really?! I don’t think his poor old eyes were twirling in the right direction. Not only is she wearing a wig, it isn’t even the right shade of red.

Anyway, I ordered one from a reputable place in whom I placed great trust that they would choose a complimentary shade of grey from their 50 choices. Wen it came, I thought it must be wrong, because my hair is blonde-ish, not silver. Well, Dr. A. liked it anyway, so I wore it to Seattle, and first cracker out of the barrel—my daughter did not. I hung it over a door knob during my visit and vowed to try again.

This time I bought from a catalogue with a picture of my hair color. The trick to ordering from the catalogue is to cover up the faces because they use adorable young women as models, who probably don’t need a wig anyway. You have to imagine yourself wearing it and flipping it about as you would something actually attached to your head. You don’t want it to scream “WIG” do you?

I loved it immediately and plopped it on my head to show Dr. A. I got a thumbs up, so I wore it to Southern California to visit my other daughter. She loved it too, so we went out to lunch at a favorite Mexican place in Camarillo, which is conveniently next door to a wig shoppe. ( I spell it that old fashioned way because it is just on the verge of being posh.) We had with us that day our eight year old great granddaughter Savanna, who flipped out when she saw all the plastic heads staring at us from the window dressed in varying lengths and shades of blonde, brown, black and even one with purple strands throughout, (it was Halloween). Naturally we went in, and since I was wearing the new style, I asked the lady behind the desk if she thought it could use some touches. She played around with it, gave it a spritz of hair spray and off I went, pleased as a puppy with a new bone.

That evening my friend Greg said he wouldn’t have known it was a ‘you-know-what’ and I choose to believe him. Now it sits alongside all my other hair styles, some of which really are not my color anymore; there may even be a strawberry blonde one because I always wanted to be a redhead. They probably have more fun than blondes. Vanity, thy name is woman. (I read that somewhere years ago when I was first married. It obviously made no impression.) This will now give Savanna something more to dwell on along with what she calls my fake teeth and fake shoulder. The rest of her family is perking along on all fours.

Forgive the idiocy, I simply had to tell you.