Genius Toiling in Obscurity

I'm not bitter. Really.

Fact 1: When I was a kid, it was very common for me to get in trouble or have my intelligence insulted by my family because I didn't know something I couldn't possibly have known, having never been taught it.

Fact 2: During my high school years, I burned through several blow dryers achieving my modified Farrah Fawcett/Dorothy Hamill flip-back 'do. I'm not sure what it's like for teenage girls these days, but back then we were heavily into cute little blow-dryers. I remember one I had that was a candy-apple red wand with a twist-style controller. Perhaps cute little blow-dryers are inherently crappy, or perhaps my habit of re-wetting my hair several times to try again for sausage-curl perfection before leaving the house each day was simply more than any hair-styling device should be asked to endure, but mine blew up or burned out on a pretty regular basis, and this was apparently a major strain on the family budget.

Thus it came to pass that, as I was preparing to leave for college back in 1983, my dad gave me a little money to run to K-mart and buy myself a new blow-dryer. "And not one of those cute and crappy ones," he admonished me. "Buy a good one."

I had no idea what the criteria for a good blow-dryer were. "One that won't blow up in six months," I assumed, but how could you tell that from looking at them on a shelf? No one had ever bothered to teach me how to choose consumer products. I certainly hadn't yet discovered Consumer Reports. So I chose my new blow-dryer based on it not being cute, and came home with a generic gun-style K-mart brand blow-dryer that was just a bit smaller than full-size.

This was the wrong choice, apparently, because my return with the blow-dryer precipitated a ranting lecture that left me in tears: I had purchased a bad blow-dryer. It would, in fact, burn out in just six months. I was incompetent, I never thought before I acted, I didn't care about my father or about how much money I wasted or how hard he had worked for it, this sort of thing was entirely typical of me because I had no common sense at all, and how I was going to manage on my own at college was a mystery to everyone.

Fast forward to last Sunday. A cold Sunday. A cold Sunday on which I had showered mere moments before I needed to leave for worship. I don't usually blow-dry anymore, but I decided that on this day, blow-drying was preferable to freeze-drying, so I dug my blow-dryer out of a drawer in the bathroom, plugged it in, and waved the business end at my head for awhile.

Then I set it down on the edge of the sink while I did a little combing. And as I combed, I glanced at the blow-dryer and saw: the K-mart logo.

Yes, 20 years--and a half--later, I'm still using the crappy blow-dryer I was a fool to buy, the one that was going to burn out in six months. It has survived the death of feathering, a punk-rock phase complete with spiking, one unfortunate permanent, two rounds of grow-it-long-then-chop-it-off, benign neglect in a closet during a close-cropped trying-to-be-butch lesbian stage, and at least one instance of being dropped into shallow water.

It had been a long time since I thought about the degrading lectures I regularly endured as a child and young adult, and even longer since thinking about them raised up the same kinds of feelings the lectures themselves used to. But looking at that blow-dryer certainly brought it all back, I'm sure in part because just less than a month ago I had the pleasure of being yelled at by my dad because I was unable to get my car up my parents' ridiculously steep and deadly ice-coated driveway when we were trying to go home after the festive yet soul-destroying Penn Family Holiday Gift Exchange.

I've forgiven my parents for a lot. The older I get, the more able I am to accept them as they are, and to enjoy what limited affection and approbation they are able to give me without constantly being disappointed that it is not more. But drying my hair with that crappy K-mart blow-dryer--now approaching the legal drinking age--on top of the most difficult family gathering I've endured in several years, refreshed something.

I'm sure my father wouldn't remember the day I bought that blow-dryer even if I tried to remind him. But I remember. And for a few minutes on Sunday, I indulged in a fantasy in which I mailed the damn thing to him with a note reading, "Here you go, Nostradamus. Plug it in, hear the roar, and weep. You were wrong about this blow-dryer, Dad, and you were wrong about me. And, Dad, there's something I've been wanting to tell you since I was a kid, something we didn't say in our family because, even though we felt the feelings, we just didn't talk about them. But time is fleeting, Dad, and however uncomfortable it makes us both, I just need to say this one time before it's too late, one time before you die. Hey, Dad: Fuck you."

Posted by Su Penn at January 21, 2004 11:34 PM | TrackBack