A Father's Concerns

Many years ago my wife and I lived alone with one another for the first time in eighteen years.  Our daughters were away, one in Connecticut at work and the other attending high school in Massachusetts.  With our daughters gone there was only a little stuff in the house to obsess over.  In the bathroom for example, the shower specifically, can generally be found the following three categories of things: bars of soap, containers, and implements.  During the period from September 6 until June 8, during that time we were alone, there could commonly be found a few of each of these things, a couple bars of soap, a couple containers of shampoo or conditioner, and three implements, one of those spongy things on a string, a razor and a pumice stone.  It was a simple matter, hardly challenging, to, while showering, make an orderly presentation of these items, to arrange them alphabetically on one of the several built in shelves.

In June both daughters arrived back home for the summer.  Katie was soon visited by a girl friend from France and Sarah by two girl friends from Connecticut.   During a shower I began my customary inventory of the vast array of things that had suddenly accumulated and set about the necessary business of creating order from chaos.    

Advanced Strengthening Hydration Therapy Intensive Treatment. I anguish over a label like that.  It’s very unsettling, too many words, doesn’t lend itself to orderly arranging.  But it jolts me back to my senses.  Little things do that, they’re life lines to reality.  In this case it’s the note on the label that says this stuff will make hair five times stronger.  Which of these girls wants their hair stronger by a factor of five and why? Will there be island boys, ala Rapunzel, heaving themselves up over the windowsills tonight after having ascended hand over hand up the luxurious folds of intensively treated hair?  Here is a bottle of Exfoliating Body Wash.  Exfoliating?  Is that like Agent Orange?  Could you accomplish the same thing, and less expensively, with a sea urchin?   Does the manufacturer presume to know better than that which created us when this protective layer of skin should be removed?  Silk Protein Enriched Shampoo and Conditioner and Clean Rinsing Conditioner for Normal to Oily Hair with Sage, Jasmine & Soy Protein in Mountain Spring Water.  I associate protein with meat and fish, sage with seasoning, soy with stir fry, and mountain spring water with the Coors brewery I visited so often while stationed in Denver.  When did these things find their way into shampoo and why?  Shimmering Shower Gel with Glitter and Fruit Essentials Body Wash in Juicy Melon or Fresh Peach.  These are frightening terms for a father; they’re flavors after all.  Encounters like these, with the real world, are the things that tether me here.  As soon as the girls come home I intend to line them up alphabetically or perhaps by height, in descending order or maybe ascending, and lay down the law.  I’m reluctant to send my girls off into the world in a shimmering condition, neither glittering, and certainly not wafting of fresh peach or juicy melon.