February 18, 1999

Few visitors come by the ranch. During hunting season, my sons and grandsons come bird and deer hunting. Christmas used to draw a few members of the family, but heavy church and holiday responsibilities brought on by parenthood stopped all travel.

The remnants of my generation are bonded to the TV screen, or so involved in either keeping their grandkids or boarding pets while their prodigies take vacations, I rarely see them, much less have them out for dinner. If they do have spare time, they spend it mailing out pictures of the grandchildren, or taking more pictures to print and to post later on.

One strange habit all overnight guests at the ranch have is leaving full bottles of shampoo in the shower stall. Well water is so much more refreshing than showering under a chemical splash of chlorinated city water, they apparently don't think they'll ever need shampoo again.

There are six leftover shampoo bottles in the bathroom cabinet. Two or three more bottles are on the edge of the tub in the other bathroom, and four or five old bottles are aging underneath the lavatory. Abandoned hair conditioner and unclaimed toothbrushes make up part of this lost and found but never reclaimed inventory.

Just as a sidelight, I will profile a few other categories in a hall closet: three pair of hunting boots without laces, a child's miniskirt, 31 socks (unmatched), a pair of green ski mittens, and a 2x5 closet floor covered in various calibers and gauges of rifle and shotgun ammunition.

All of the shampoo labels make huge claims to solve dryness, oily scalp, scaling, dandruff, broken ends, faded coloring, tighter coiling of spit curls, and better backgrounding of bangs and forelocks. The directions don't come right out and say so, but imply these miraculous potions smooth out cowlicks in pubescent boys and make pigtails come out even in young girls. The only appeal to graybeards or grannies I've found on any of the labels was a warning that excessive suds might make the shower floor slick.

I shampoo with a special home recipe I brought back from California made of eucalyptus bark and leaves. The cleansing power is moderate enough to leave sufficient residue on the scalp to support the downy stem of the hair. Also, the dripping suds from the genus eucalyptae (No such thing as genus eucalyptae. I just wanted to fancy this up a bit.) shampoo running down off the forehead into the eyes helps prevent cataracts. Gargled, I have been told, the minute amount of eucalyptus sap leftover in the bottom of the bottle makes dentures seat better. I know I hear better after washing my hair. Has something to do with the way I throw my head back to direct the flow of water to my back instead of down my face.

This morning I grabbed a more recent acquisition, a bottle of pink herbal shampoo, designed to restore the color to dyed hair and highlight the original hue. The aroma was of one of those fancy tropical rum drinks called piña colada and so important in creating bedlam on the beaches during the college spring breaks. Just the modest amount in my palm brought visions of white sand beaches shaded by palms and awash in the blue rollers of soft ocean waves. Of lovely copper-skinned, barefooted Polynesian girls dancing in gold and brown sarongs on overturned dugout canoes, pounding out the same beat as drummed on hollow logs by their ancestors.

But the results of this pink herbal concoction weren't like a ukulele serenade on St. Andrew's Bay. The more I rinsed, the more lather boiled up on my head and down off my brow. Blinded, I didn't dare take the chance of hoping to pick a conditioner out of the row of bottles on the shelf outside the stall. As the suds subsided, my temples started throbbing and a strange sensation passed up my sideburns and over my scalp.

I just knew I was having a stroke. At my age, too powerful a sneeze can cause brain trauma and make the stems of the nervous system tremble like the strings on an acoustic guitar. Then I remembered the label said, "To help restore hair to its original hue." So all the pounding was a chemical reaction in the follicle to bring back the red color that had vanished 20 years ago.

By mid-morning, the pounding had gone away and the comfortable numbness of advanced age returned to my temples. My hair glistened in an alabaster sheen only slightly tinted in red. At odd moments during the rest of the day, I glanced in the mirror at the big change in my appearance. A change so big I was bound to be hard to recognize by those who had never known me as a redhead…