Men who have never tried to sleep with rollers in their hair have no idea of the misery we women go through just to look half-way presentable.
More years ago than I care to remember, I bought a new, bonnet-style hairdryer. I taught school at the time and had been putting my hair up in huge rollers every night. Some nights it seemed as though I hardly slept at all.
Anyway, I loved my new bonnet hair dryer. I could roll my hair damp, and a half hour later, I looked like I had just visited a beauty parlor, all by 7:30 in the morning.
Unfortunately, as all good things seem to do, the manufacture of this type of hair dryer came to an end. New, hand held dryers replaced them and the public adored them.
I never could get the hang of using a hand held dryer. It didn't make much sense to wear your arm out holding a heavy drying in the air, moving it all around your head to make sure your hair dried evenly, and finally finishing the job only to find you had missed a spot on the back of your head.
Of course I realized that the new dryers were designed to accommodate new hair styles that didn't usually include long thick hair wrapped around rollers like mine, and, being a creature of habit, I had no intention of changing my hairstyle to accommodate a hair dryer.
So, year after year, I continued to use my old dryer. The plastic in the bonnet dried and cracked but I patched it with plastic tape and continued to use it. The motor began to sound like a motorcycle and no amount of oiling quieted it down. Still I used the dryer, putting cotton in my ears to dull the racket.
Finally, my beloved dryer began to overheat and my husband came running upstairs to find out what the awful smell was. Fortunately, it wasn't my hair-just the dryer, but I felt like I had lost a good friend.
For a number of years since then, I have searched out local Goodwill, St. Vincent DePaul's, and neighborhood garage sales for bonnet-style hairdryers. The few I came across usually worked for a while before giving up the Ghost, but one thing most of them had in common was that the bonnet was stiff and cracked.. I bought one or two on eBay, but they too had bonnets that were ready for the garbage bin.
I posted a tongue-in-cheek article online that fetched a lot of comments, but no real help in securing a new bonnet hair-dryer that really worked.
One-by-one, I accumulated a collection of dryers that did work, but that no longer had usable bonnets. I scoured the internet for manufacturers of bonnets and tried a few, but none were satisfactory for my thick hair.
A few months ago, I stumbled across a dryer WITH a soft pliable bonnet. The unit looked as though it had never been used.
Last week, I got a long distance call from a man who lived several states away. He had read the tongue-in-cheek article I had mentioned earlier, even though it was several years old by now, and wanted to talk to me about it. I thought, that would be great. Maybe, if he had a bonnet that would fit one of my dryers, I could buy it to store for future use.
As it turned out, it wasn't a bonnet or even a hairdryer that he wanted to dispose of. Instead, he wanted to buy one of my surplus dryers, minus the bonnet, for his grandmother who apparently had a bonnet, but her hairdryer had failed. She was in her 90s.
We quickly worked out a deal. Actually, I couldn't charge him for a dryer that didn't even have a bonnet on it, but I did ask him to pay the shipping charges. As far as I am concerned, it was a win-win situation. I got rid of one of the dryers cluttering up my spare bedroom, and he solved a problem for his grandmother.
I didn't solve my hairdryer bonnet problem, but I have one that is working for the time being, and I got to feel good about helping someone else. Who could ask for anything more?
Jeanne Gibson writes from her home in Springfield, Oregon. Visit her blog at: sowingseedsthatmatter.blogspot.com/2010/07/i-dont-like-change.html sowingseedsthatmatter.blogspot.com/2010/07/i-dont-like-change.html to see a more complete article she has written on this subject.
留言列表
