Trina Machacek
It’s funny to me, the one-liners I hear and remember. Not only that, but how often one will fit a situation in life.
I was lucky enough to round up a group of high school students and take them on a tour back East in the 1980s — my first time chaperoning. What a trip!
We were paired with two other schools from around the country. A dozen school kids and three chaperones made up our little group of adventurers. It was fun and so rewarding. Some of those kids — I see them still — remember seeing the Empire State Building.
We bumpkins from our cloistered hamlet of Eureka couldn’t understand the people, plot, or play of Porgy and Bess. Without knowing it was bad taste, we walked out at intermission. Yes, we were a radical little bunch. But! Yes, a free-living, spirited “but.”
The one-liner I remember to this day was from another chaperone, from Oregon. On one of our daily bus tours, we were talking and getting to know each other. The subject of shaving came up — young men starting to shave, young ladies shaving their legs. This one woman, pulling up her knee socks under her jeans, said, “I hate to shave my legs in the spring. It’s what helps keep my socks up!”
Now that’s a one-liner that comes to mind after a winter of wearing long pants — every spring.
I know I’m not the only one who knows exactly what that woman was talking about. I bet those young girls on that bus so long ago know, by now, what she meant too. Those girls are in their mid to late 30s by now. That’s when it might start — letting the shaving of legs slide a little longer than we do in the summer.
We don’t all live in dresses and slacks and fine suits of clothes year-round. There are those of us — mostly rural gals — who might let the hair on our legs go just one more week through the dark, cold winter months.
Ask any rural husband who knows: when the sun comes back, they must be careful picking up a razor that might have come in contact with a pair of legs that haven’t seen the sun in more than a month — of Sundays! Chances are that razor has hacked through some pretty fierce stands of hair, becoming about as sharp as an ax that’s cut a winter’s worth of wood.
Pretty soon the man comes out of the bathroom with little pieces of toilet paper stuck on his face — the red-and-white dots needed to stop the bleeding from the nicks and cuts after the Little Woman, coming alive from hibernation, has been shaving with his new three-bladed razor that was just sitting there, unprotected, in the shower.
Yes, it happens every spring. All over this great nation we call the land of the free and the home of the brave. Because brave is the man who forgetfully and unsuspectingly takes his skin — unsuspecting — into that shave-cream-covered face, as Old Man Winter moves to the left to let Mother Nature take over.
As women, we feel it is our right to grab the man’s razor. We have tried the lovely, girly pink or mint green razors made just for ladies. We have taken those and shaved — nearly daily in the summer — because they just don’t … well, they just don’t do the job as well as the men’s chrome-and-black, heavy-weighted, multiple-bladed hair annihilator that we desire.
We, too, want to avoid the five o’clock shadow and stubble we get without bringing in a blowtorch nearly daily to fend off the hair on our long, beautiful, summer-kissed legs.
So when that big boy razor is out in the open — just hanging there in the shower, unchained — we take full advantage of it. Without guilt, I might add.
Because we sometimes find our kitchen spaghetti strainer out in the shop being used as a small-parts washer, or our good diamond nail file used to file down points on some car or tractor that’s sputtering and missing!
It’s a give-and-take world.
Ladies — it’s nearly Father’s Day! Get him a new razor — and one for yourself too. Don’t forget the extra blades — and toilet paper. Maybe even a styptic pencil!
Trina lives in Diamond Valley, north of Eureka, Nevada. She loves to hear from readers. Email her at [email protected]
Really!
Comment
Comments