… as learned from my father at a way too early age.
I knew how to shave my face, armpits and chest by the age of nine. Not that there was any hair to shave but my father insisted it was best to stay on top of things before they got out of hand. So I did it. The face thing I got. The armpits thing I got once my father claimed that armpit hair only ruined your dress shirts. The chest? Never got a clear answer to that one.
Hand sanitizing way before hand sanitizing became a thing. I was taught to get the Comet cleanser from under the kitchen sink and scrub my hands like hell. So I did it frequently. But then I found that excess Comet was getting trapped underneath my fingernails. I brought this up to my dad and he guided me toward the light.
You take that scrub brush right there and scrub those fingernails like crazy underneath hot water. Then take the tip of a knife and scrape off what’s left.
So again I did it frequently. But that’s not the only thing Comet offered. Once a month I was instructed to put some on a toothbrush and scrub my teeth to get them pearly white. Now this one I questioned mainly because it really stung and I’d feel sick to my stomach afterwards.
Well it’s better than having your teeth rot. See? Look at mine.
Of course they were brilliantly white albeit a little dull. It wasn’t until college that I learned about something called enamel seeing as I had very little of it and a popsicle would make me scream. Now once I hit puberty, I was already shaving various areas of my body and face but the work didn’t stop there. My father introduced me to a gadget called a tweezer. Now according to him, tweezing unwanted hair was a daily battle and best to stay on top of things lest your ears and nose started looking like heads of lettuce. So I tweezed. Not sure but I think I was removing skin more than a follicle. I occasionally bled from my nose and ears but daddy just said it was a stage I was going through and to stay the course.
So I did. A few years after my initial tweeze I noticed that my dad would constantly be fidgeting with his nose in the rearview mirror whilst driving. Pulling and pulling. Never satisfied. I shared with him that he tended to swerve to the right while he was immersed in a cleanup but that didn’t deter him. He had a major issue with. nose hair, especially when they started turning grey. And it wasn’t just his nose hairs that he tackled. One day we were talking to our next door neighbor and he pulled an errant hair right out of Mrs. Greenwood’s nose and kept talking. She was mortified and in pain. I just thought it was another issue I had yet to learn … that being communal tweezing. I tried it once on a friend. It didn’t go well.
And there were other procedures that needed to be tended to. Rubbing the bottoms of my feet with sandpaper. Plucking my eyebrows to avoid something called an Armenian unibrow. Rubbing hemorrhoid gel underneath my eyes to prevent bags. It was a lot to accomplish.
Skipping forward to today, I still employ a few of them. Not the ones involving Comet cleanser, although you have to give him credit now that everyone is obsessed with teeth whitening. I do it occasionally but I have such little enamel left that it’s best just to gargle.
And scrubbing my face with Comet? Today we call it exfoliating. He wasn’t wrong.