I still get perms and I’m lucky enough to have a hairdresser who is happy to do them for me!

Gazing at the salon mirror in front of me, I watched the hairdresser part my hair into sections to wrap around perm curlers. Without my glasses, I couldn’t see fine details, but that didn’t bother me. I knew I was in good hands because my hairdresser once told me she enjoyed giving perms. Not everyone who works in a beauty salon does.

My out-of-focus vision made me feel sleepy. Listening to the low murmur of conversations between other hairdressers and clients was soothing. Watching Lisa my hairdresser, wet a stubborn wisp of hair, I commented, “My hair resists curling.”

 Lisa answered noncommittally, “Your hair is very fine.”

“It’s like baby hair.” I admitted.

Grinning, Lisa confessed, “At the shop here, we call hair that’s very fine, ‘frog fur’.” After snapping the last perm rod shut, she applied perm solution to my hair. Then, covering the curlers with plastic, Lisa stated, “Now we wait for the solution to do its job.”

As Lisa bustled around clearing her workstation. I thought about her frog fur comment. It had triggered a memory of something I often said when I worked as a Certified Nursing Assistant.

One of my jobs was to get patients up for physical therapy. Pain made many of the patients reluctant to move. Typically, I’d get an orthotic patient on the edge of the bed, and then Duane, who worked in the physical therapy department, would enter the room to help. He often cheerfully asked, “How’s Kathy, today?”

As we pivoted the patient from the edge of bed to the wheelchair, I boasted, “I’m as fine as frog fur.” Patients would usually give me a questioning look. I would shrug while adjusting the chair’s footrest while explaining, “Frog fur is so fine, most people think it’s slime.” The patient giggled. I laughed. This was exactly the response I was looking for; distraction lessens pain.

The perm made my fine hair very curly. Just what I wanted. As Lisa trimmed the hair, I asked, “Do you think my hair will get coarse as it turns gray? A neighbor told me her hair was like wires after it turned white.”

Lisa ran her comb through a small patch of hair on the crown of my head. The spot had turned white over forty years ago. She shook her head and said, “Your white hair is just as fine as all the brown ones around it.”

While driving home, another memory came to mind. In this one I was 18 years-old and new at the hospital when I overheard two forty-year-old nurses discuss aging. One complained, “When I was twenty, I had beautiful dark eyebrows. When I look in a mirror now, I can hardly see them!”

I wondered if that was normal. At home I asked Mr. Google if middle age made hair become thin. “He” found an Internet article on the topic for me to read. In it, a board-certified dermatologist named Dr. Lian Mack explained, “With age, the eyebrow hair follicles become senescent, often producing thinner, finer hairs.”

I sat at my desk thinking that this couldn’t possibly be true about all people. As my father grew older, his eyebrows became large and bushy. On the other hand, the fine hairs surrounding his bald pate, were wispy and the lovely dark brown hair of his youth had become a mousy grayish brown, His wild eyebrows were black and stayed starkly black right to the end of his life. Whenever Daddy visited a barber, all he needed was a neck trim and his eyebrows pruned.

That night, I burrowed into my pillow as I usually do to sleep. The next morning, I was happy to see my curls were still there. While applying make-up for the day, I looked into the magnified mirror and was shocked to discover I had one long, dark, unruly eyebrow hair in my right eyebrow. The evil follicle looked familiar. In my mind I screamed, “Daddy, how could you do this to me?”

Plucking out that nasty, mutant hair made me feel somewhat better, but I’m watching to see if it grows back. If it does come back, along with other unruly hair follicles, I won’t be feeling as fine as frog fur!