I come from good hair

My father's side of the family had good hair. By that, I mean plenty. I inherited it. When I was young and naive and easily-embarrassed, my mother would take me for a haircut and all the hairdressers would gather 'round and marvel at my head of hair. It was a horror.

Now that I'm much older I'm OK with my hair, even when my hairdresser has to go back for a refill on the hair color, or when she starts looking fatigued from holding the blow dryer. Mr. Gadget doesn't have hair issues. You could say he's follically-challenged. With all the hair I have to spare, I've offered more than once to be a hair donor, but he always politely declines. When I buy highlights he buys hats.

So my grandmother, whose name was Ferna, taught me how to crochet. She's the one on the left with her arm around my father. I always remember her having a small crochet project in her purse whenever she left the house. Among the many treasures she made were four crocheted bedspreads--one for each of her children-- using a small steel crochet hook and cotton thread. I have one now and I use it as a coverlet in the summer, since it's a bit too small for our king-sized bed.

My grandfather, the fellow up there on the right, passed away when my grandmother was a young woman of 60. She didn't drive and didn't have a clue about how to write checks and pay bills, so my father taught her those things since we lived just down the street. It wasn't long before she started driving all of her friends to the local senior citizens center. And then she parlayed her babysitting skills into quite a lucrative business. It was during her babysitting jobs......and her weekly viewing of the Lawrence Welk Show.....that she did most of her crocheting.

I can remember sitting beside her on the couch as she showed me how to hold the hook and make a chain. I'd get going on a row, and she'd run off to the kitchen to stir a kettle of something.....and it was during these times that I'd sneak a cookie out of her sailor boy cookie jar. Those days marked the beginning of my love/hate relationship with crocheting and the scale.

Grandma Ferna had a way of occasionally putting her foot in her mouth and saying something inappropriate. Or sometimes she'd just come out with something rather peculiar. We used to affectionately call these Ferna-isms. I'm afraid I've inherited this trait along with the hair. My family will never let me forget the time I said, when asked if I wanted to go out for dinner to the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, "But I can't eat all I can eat."

A few years ago Tech Guy gave me a beautiful Boston fern for Mother's Day. While I'm not one to name my plants, this one insisted on being called Ferna. Whereas most of my previous house plant experiments had failed, Ferna thrived. Then one day Mr. G and I made plans to leave town for a while, and we left her in the care of Tech Guy, who assured us he would take his plant-sitting duties seriously. Well, you can only imagine. I brought poor Ferna home, stuck her in a corner and said my good-byes.

But I guess it wasn't Ferna's time. I bundled her up and carried her across the street to my neighbor's house.....the neighbor with the green thumb. I'm happy to report that Ferna has had a complete recovery. She's all green and lush and frondy again. It seems the two Fernas had much in common. They both had a knack for blooming where they were planted.