Imagine that ...

... a baby rat. Not one of these, who are really too cute for words (sorry I can't refer you to the photographer – I don't remember where I got the photo), but the wild variety. These are also pretty cute, but black, and when you – walking into the bedroom dripping wet, hair a wreck (this story soon to be told as well), clad only in a yellow terrycloth towel and rhinestone earrings – when you walk into your bedroom like that, and find this small black baby rat soaking wet and stone dead in the middle of your bedspread, held ever so tenderly between the furry front paws of the large black and proudly grinning seven-year-old baby animal you love more than anything in all the world ... what do you do then?

I took it away from him and put it in the garbage. In his defense, I doubt he killed it himself. If he were good at, or even just interested in, killing rats – we would not have had the rat problem we had all winter and halfway through the summer last year. More likely he found it already dead, carried it around the yard in his mouth for awhile, and then brought it into the bedroom to eat. Lucky for my two loyal readers, the camera battery was dead, so you get to see a cute picture of living tan baby rats, instead of a wet dead black one on a blue blanket.

This is not the worst thing he's ever brought into my bed. The worst thing was a decaying deer skull with a few leftover bits of brain drying up inside, and a scrap of fur still attached to the scalp. This I found on my pillow a few summers ago, a glorious trophy he had claimed from the road kill I'd been smelling for several days, but had been unable (lacking the dog's amazing carrion-finding abilities) to track down and dispose of. I threw that away too. Also, the pillow.

So, about my hair: I decided it was high time to do something drastic. More or less in sync with the rest of me, it seems to want nothing more these days than to lie down and relax for awhile. I had been reading some fashion magazines ... and was somehow mesmerized by them to once again do to my hair the thing that I have not done in more than twenty years –

I'm almost too ashamed to say the word. It starts with a P, and it ends with ERM.

Well, I did it. I was convinced by the evil magazines that technology and imagination had evolved to such an extent over the last two decades, that my concerns about dryness, frizziness, poodle-osity, were completely unnecessary. I would lie in the chair with my head in a cloud of delightful smelling aromatherapy vapors, awakening in a few short hours (more or less) to a gorgeous head of lustrous, healthy, luxurious and extremely subtle waves. NOT POODLE CURLS. Not an afro. Not the kind of hair Ferris Bueller's sister might have had, if she'd been given to torturing herself with curlers and chemicals instead of bad boys in leather jackets.

Anyway. Once every twenty years is not so bad, I guess. Back when I used to drink, it would hapen every once in awhile that I would somehow forget myself and drink more than my usual one and a half beers. Every time, I would end up sitting in the bathroom, rubbing my numb lips with my numb fingers while endlessly peeeeeeeeeeing, and every time, the thought would occur to me, "Oh, yeah! This is why I don't like drinking." Maybe perms are like that, too. Every twenty years maybe I will get so fed up with my hair that I'll forget what it's really like to stink of amonia for days on end, to have to use deep conditioners every week, to wait and wait and wait for it to finally grow out – and decide, "What the heck. It can't be any worse than it already is!"

Of course I'm exaggerating. It's actually fine, just not exactly what I wanted. After two days at work, still nobody has noticed or said anything – possibly because I've kept it back in a braid both days. Would it be so bad to wear my hair in a braid for the next six months to a year? Probably not. Maybe after a few more days, I'll even start to like it.

The lesson learned is this: Always go with your gut. I knew when I saw her setting out those rollers that they were not going to give me what I wanted. But I'd brought a photo – several photos – showing exactly what I was going for, and I'd described it to her in great detail, and she'd assured me she understood and could deliver exactly that. I trusted her because she was the expert, and because I was tired of things the way they were. Now, things are different. Several thousand things, in fact. Meaning, each and every hair on my head is now different than it was just the other day.

How many hairs are there on an average human head, anyway?