Saturday nights were focused on Sunday

Saturday nights were focused on Sunday

The Blizzard of ’73

The Blizzard of ’73

Spending time with Granddaddy

Spending time with Granddaddy

Can’t Get There From Here

Can’t Get There From Here

Ora Lee’s first taste of iced tea

Ora Lee’s first taste of iced tea

Jealous of mother’s hair

“Black, black, black is the color of my true love’s hair…”*

Black-haired and hazel-eyed, my Irish mother was the only girl in a family with four brothers. All her brothers’ hair began to turn gray at an early age, but mama’s didn’t. She just had a narrow streak of white from her right temple straight back through her lush, black waves.

Unfortunately, my hair took after my English daddy, who had brown hair and blue eyes. I was always jealous of mother’s hair.

When I was fifteen years old or so, mama took me to her hairdresser. The shop was centrally located in a storefront beside Sears, Roebuck and Company on North Irby Street. I thought I was getting a hair permanent, an event I dreaded. Frizzy, smelly, itchy curls for Easter. More frizzy, smelly, itchy curls for Christmas.

I pouted as I was draped in plastic and the leather chair pumped up to the appropriate level. My mood didn’t improve as mama whispered something to the beautician, gave me a pat and said she’d be in the cubicle next door.

The next thing I knew the circumference of my face and neck was being wrapped in cotton batting, as usual. Cold smelly chemicals were dabbed on my hair, just like usual. My head was encased in a plastic shower-cap, an egg timer was set and a magazine plopped into my hands.

Determined to make the best of it, I got engrossed in the romantic short story in the Redbook and tried to ignore the drips escaping down the back of my neck. “We’ll do the roll-ups in a bit,” the smiling lady said as she went out for a chat with mama.

Eventually the timer went off, the breezy beautician returned, peeked under the plastic, pronounced it “just right” and whirled me around to the sink for a rinse. Huddled under the noisy hair dryer, I finished Redbook, McCall’s magazine and an old Readers Digest before we got to the un-roll and the brush-out. Finally the smiling beautician presented me with a hand mirror.

Holy cow! My hair had undergone a miracle! It was no longer a mousy ash brown – it was now a lovely auburn brown. (I have never seen my natural hair color since.) I suddenly loved my mother fiercely – she understood, she really understood how much I had always admired her hair, how much I had always deplored mine.

Soon after that my whole family, grandparents and all, went to a movie at the Carolina Theater. It was rare for the grandparents to attend a movie – raising their family in the depression years they didn’t “hold with frivolous foofaraw.” But there they were standing in line just behind mama, daddy, Harold and me.

In a gruff whisper, Da spoke into Mimi’s ear. “Betty’s sure gotten to be red-headed, ain’t she…” You could hear the question mark in his comment, wondering how on earth my hair had gone from brown to red.

Da’s brand of Irish were Black Irish – mostly black or dark-haired, not red-haired, and they didn’t change their gene structure at fifteen. I can still hear Mimi shush-shushing him, trying to explain in a few words about beauty parlors and hair dye.

Since it goes better with the fire-engine red shirts I favor, in recent years I tended to stick with medium brown hair. When too much familial gray was first showing up around the edges, I visited my neighborhood drugstore. My tried and true brand was out.

I browsed through the hair-color selections. “Brown with auburn highlights.” Hmmm. A bit of auburn again might be fun. I shampooed it in, read a few chapters of a murder mystery, rinsed, dried, and –

My hair was the most unnatural pink you ever saw. Highlights? Forget highlights, where was the brown? I prayed I didn’t see anyone I knew as I drove back to the store and bought brown with NO red in it, according to the label. I re-colored, re-rinsed, re-dried – and it was still red. Darker red, but still not brown.

Now, I was a busy person, work, church, grocery-shopping, bill-paying, errands around town, you know the drill. I had no choice but to go out in public. Some folks were kind enough to say they liked it. A few giggled until they saw the set of my jaw.

I let my hair enjoy its redness for a week. This time I bought DARK brown with no red, and this time it did come out brown. Dark brown. Really, really dark brown. Almost black, it was so brown. Oh well, I looked more like my mama. That wasn’t a bad thing, really.

It looked pretty good with my fire-engine red shirts. I thought I might just keep it that way for a while. (And I did… for a while. Story written in 2006.)

* Traditional Scottish folk song, though this video says it’s Irish. Beautiful either way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3rbRX675JE

My Permanent Record

My Permanent Record

Skyscrapers and Me Don’t Mix

SC Family Memories

Florence Trust Building (officially, the Florence Title and Trust Building), original width, early 1920s.

I enjoyed climbing trees at age eight or so. There weren’t many trees in our yard but Mimi’s chinaberries weren’t hard to climb. They had low-growing, thick limbs with lots of handy knots and smaller limbs to use for navigation. Stringing wire for tin-can telephones, playing cops and robbers or war games in chinaberry trees was a regular summer pastime when Harold and I were at our grandparents’.

Granddaddy operated the cotton gin and sawmill at Cusaac’s Crossroads for a while. Hot boring days could become more interesting with climbs to the top of the cotton seed house. It was a small square building atop sturdy posts, kept filled by a conveyor that blew in machine-separated cotton seeds from the top. Harold and I climbed up the ladder (that was a no-no), jumped into the soft…

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Where and When are You?

SC Family Memories

At my brother’s house a while back, I sniffed the fragrance of a blooming shrub at the side door and suddenly I was back in the 1950’s… I was standing beside my mother in the back yard of that same house, handing her a home-made milk shake.

Mama loved planting, pruning, or digging in the dirt, always doing something with the flowers and bushes. When she got hot and sweaty she’d call me outside and request a milk shake, usually just sweetened milk with vanilla flavoring in a glass full of ice cubes.

Not interested in gardening myself in those days, I was grateful she didn’t make me stay out there to help rid the world of errant bamboo. The sweet smell of that shrubbery had taken me back fifty years in an instant.

Back at home, I recently rearranged seldom used dresser drawers and came across an old yellow…

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Summers were safe in the 1950’s

SC Family Memories

Timrod Park Swimming Pool, 1950’s… the scent of chloride, “thunk thunk” of the diving board and splashes of fun-loving swimmers. Summers were pretty safe for kids in search of fun in the late 1940’s and early 50’s Florence.

After school and on Saturday afternoons, pals could inhabit city streets without parents going nuts with worry. You could leave your unlocked house, ride your bike or roller skate along city streets, come home for a quick parent check, then go again.

Round up a few friends and you could play a game of hopscotch drawn on the sidewalks with bits of rock, play tag, pick-up-sticks, marbles or jacks.

If a neighbor had recently acquired a new wringer-washer, you could use the left-over packing crate for a handy jeep. A real find might be a sturdy refrigerator box — handy for two-man tanks. Gather up a few more kids and war games…

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