GOOD GROOMING

A dear friend of mine delighted me with a narrative about her fun foray into turquoise, one of the ‘different’, shall we say, nail polish colors. The colors are not so new to the world, though I really do think that any but the red and pinkish shades are ugly, but they’re new to senior gals like us. She got me to thinking about finger nails – and there lies (lay?) an essay.

Nails? I just try to keep mine clean and neat. My Mom never used polish on her nails, although she had lovely hands. I must be a throwback: I’ve got short, stubby hands. My father was a pianist and had long fingers, but I can just about reach an octave. To top it off, I bit my nails until just before I was married. Couldn’t have ratty nails when I showed off my new, old wedding ring (it’s my husband’s Grandmother’s wedding ring from Norway in 1901) so I finally let my nails grow. If you know what you’re looking at, you can tell that I bit my nails for years. I know several gals with model-worthy hands and nails. I think they’ve been taking good care of their hands and nails since waaaay back. It’s ingrained in them, not in me.



This wasn't me - I bit my nails for years.

Good grooming is ingrained in many if not most women. As a young girl, the closest I got to any tips and know-how was the Good Grooming Badge in Girl Scouts. It’s not that my Mom wasn’t well groomed – she was. It’s just that she rarely if ever had my sister or me in to see what she did with herself: Mom had too much on her plate to even think about stuff like that. I do know that she was one of those women who couldn’t wear perfume – it turned sour on her and reeked. And she loved the smell of perfume – her favorite was always Chanel N°5. She kept a bottle of it on her dresser and gave it a sniff every once in a while.

I think that my Mom absorbed her grooming knowledge from her older sister. Like me, she wasn’t very good at teaching others the things she had just assimilated from observation. She just did her morning prep and that was that. In my mind’s eye, as I think about such things, I can see myself only watching her cook, clean the house, or take care of chores. I can’t ‘hear’ that she’s telling me anything – I’m just watching her. Oooh yes – she did teach us the proper way to iron. I get a ‘visual’ on that one! I think she hated to iron. I know that in later years she told me that when we were little she had enough hand-me-down dresses for my sister and me and enough playsuits for my brother so she had to iron only once a month. It was economical to be in a family with lots of cousins. She was delighted when we went to school and wore uniforms.

Maybe Mom was unconscious of us is a way. When I started on a ‘real’ job – not just baby-sitting and summer jobs – I bought a lovely, lacy slip with some of my first pay check. Mom commented that she didn’t know I liked such frilly things. No, of course she didn’t. We never thought to complain or comment on what she purchased for us. It wasn’t in us to have comments or complaints. She purchased whatever we needed and what she purchased in the way of most clothing was to her own tailored taste.

The Girl Scout Good Grooming badge showed Cinderella’s pumpkin and glass slipper. Well, I was sort of the pumpkin type. Oh, I was allowed use a little Tangee lipstick on occasion – remember that stuff? You can still get it at Vermont Country Store - but that was about it until I spent some summer money and learned a bit about makeup from a friend. She didn’t use much either, so it was almost the blind leading the blind.

But here I am at seventy, and I think I’ve done all right by myself in the grooming department. Because my hair is blond verging on white, if I don’t want to look blank as my blond aunts did in their old age I have to use eyebrow pencil and mascara. But those and a bit of lipstick seem to do the trick. Sometimes we oldsters go about things wither with complete neglect or with a heavy hand, so I’ve asked my stepdaughter and daughter-in-law to tell me if I make a mess of anything or need more of something in the way of my grooming efforts for my face or body.  I appreciate all the help I can get!

 

I'm more of a plain moth than a butterfly.

 

THE FIVE AND TEN CENT STORE

When I was a kid my Mom gave me a small allowance. The kicker was that I couldn’t spend it all and had to give her back a certain amount of it at the end of the week or she’d deduct that from my next allowance, and I’d still have to save the same amount for the following week.  It made a fairly wise spender out of me, I can tell you that!  I can also tell you that, unknown to me, she banked those savings.  One day she handed me a small, brown savings passbook (I can still remember the color) with a tidy amount in it.  I’m not sure why I got the passbook when I did; the occasion has been superseded in my memory by the fact that I had undreamed-of savings in my hands. I do remember wanting to have some of it to take to the five and ten.

The Spalding Pinky

I loved the five and ten cent store.  I wasn’t given any treats there like the slice of bologna from the butcher or the cookie from the baker, but the treat was in all the different stuff to be seen there – everything from candy to cake pans, with great things in between.  Pinky balls, roller skates (and skate keys – I lost mine several times!), hankies, underwear, crepe paper, kitchen utensils, school supplies, or cosmetics – today we have specialty stores for most of this stuff, but then you could get it all at the five and ten – F.W. Woolworth’s to be sure. 

There was no one smell in the store – nothing like going into the bakery or drug store – but many smells: toiletries and soaps, rubber toys, pop corn, and the aromas wafting from the lunch counter.  We never had anything to eat at the lunch counter, though I wanted to.  I’d have liked to sit on one of those swivel stools and go round and round.  But in those times Mom was really watching the budget so we ate at home.

We moved a few times during my childhood, and I recall the ‘early’ five and tens, but the last was the most fun.  As with most stores of that day, the floor was wood.  It had buckled down one aisle, and it was fun to try to walk the whole way on the hump, or walk with one foot on each side of it – sort of like walking along a street with one foot on a curb and one in the gutter.

Many things we got at the five and ten are scarce today, and going to a dollar store (I call a lot of that stuff junk) or Walmart is just not the same. I will say that the closest match to the five and ten experience is going to the Vermont Country Store up in Weston, Vermont.  They bill themselves as being "purveyors of practical and hard-to-find products." They’ve got all sorts of things I haven’t seen in years: Glass Wax, Tangee lipstick (the first lipstick I was allowed to use), hair nets, Garibaldi biscuits, and lots of penny candy. They’ve even got the bumpy wood floors.

Today the Vermont Country Store
 stocks many of the same items that
were available at this Woolworth's

Before we moved to SCCL we lived only about an hour away from Weston, so a trip up there was one of our usual jaunts.  If you’re ever up that way you should make it a point to visit the Vermont Country Store and some of the other nice shops in the town.  And you can have a great lunch there too.  The Ortons, owners of the Vermont Country Store, have made the house next door into the Bryant House Restaurant.  Try the ham and cheddar melt or my favorite, the Monte Cristo, and an apricot sour.  The lunch counter at Woolworth’s was never like this – some things get better, I’m delighted to say.