Playing Hair

Okay. So I had just gotten Mother to bed and was sitting here spending a little time to myself when at 12:15 a.m. I heard Joe up and moving around. I put a curtain over the backdoor, which cut my nose off to spite my face, because now I can't check up on him by watching his reflection in the windows. I peeked in, and he was in the back bathroom/utility room sitting on a stool at the vanity. I couldn't tell exactly what he was doing, but he seemed okay, so I left him to it.

In a few minutes he came into the living room, slowly sat down on the sofa beside me, and started rubbing his hands through his hair. Then he looked up at me and began a long rambling conversation about "playing hair." He'd done it. The women had done it. He expected it was different with the women than the men. He got it started, and we needed to do it for a few days, and he was just telling me about it. The phrase he kept using was "playing hair."


Now I'm good at translating a lot of what he says and divining what he means, but I have to say this one has me completely stumped. Completely. I have absolutely no clue what this is all about. Something bothering him about the vanity and combing hair? Wonder what the sitters did that he watched - fixing their hair? Stumped, I tell ya.

Then he went into telling me about his bad knee and comparing it to his good knee. He had knee surgery on one knee and got too senile to have it done on the other. Damn, I wish I'd realized how senile they really were when I could have, Ha!, helped. Wouldn't have worked because neither ever thought any suggestion of mine was worth spit. I'd noticed earlier that he was having a lot of trouble walking and navigating coming through the door from his den.

He simply refused to use a cane to help him walk when he began to need it. Now he's too senile to even think of it. So for all you men out there who think you can do everything forever and are too proud to use a cane when you begin to need it, RETHINK. There's nothing more dashing than a man using a dapper cane. You'll become accustomed to it, and your children won't be sitting around waiting for you to fall and break your hip and wondering about nursing home care costs.

Well, after showing me his knee, Joe rambled back again into the hair thing and concluded that he'd told me about it and all would be okay. He got up and made his way back to bed. I got on blogspot to document it.

While I'm here, I'll say that Lola spent the evening confused and worried about putting face cream on. I'd told her she hadn't cleaned her face since I was back, and she was salty when I kissed her goodnight. I asked if she'd rather just use a wet washcloth than face cream, and she was all for the wash cloth. Yet because I didn't get the face cream out of her sight, she kept asking questions about it until I finally moved it.

Oh, and I just went into the kitchen for a fresh soda, and found two glasses of warm water sitting on the kitchen table. I guess Joe thought he needed water, poured it from the tap on warm, sat them down and forgot about them.