A heart-warming holiday memory provided by V-Grrrl’s Big Brother (6 foot 3 inches tall and old as a rock.)

Time flies and placing events correctly on the timeline of life gets harder and harder...but I’ll give it a try. I’m recalling a Christmas that occurred when I was in Junior High at Burrs Lane School in the 1960s in New York.

Because as kids we didn’t have any spending money, my mom would often order little gifts for us to wrap up and give to her and my dad on Christmas. They would come in from mail-order places like Spencer’s Gifts, Walter Drake, or Lillian Vernon. Inexpensive things like the bamboo back-scratcher that stayed around for years, easily reaching that elusive spot between the shoulder blades.

This particular year, an equally practical gift was in the works...a nose hair trimmer. It was a real beauty of a device...a chrome-plated cylinder with pronounced serrations at one end and a small knurled knob at the other. Probably no more than 2 inches in length and about the diameter of a pencil it appeared to be a well thought out solution to unsightly nasal hair.

Dad, being a good sport, thought so too. Carefully, and without even a glance toward the instructions, he inserted the serrated end of the trimmer into one of his nostrils, engaging an unknown number of unwanted hairs. Then, with all of our upturned heads watching in suspense, he deftly spun the little knurled knob.

They say that everyone remembers where they were when President Kennedy was shot or the World Trade Center attacked. I remember that Christmas morning scene the same way. Dad was standing near the entrance to the living room facing into the living room in our direction so that, following this demonstration of the nose hair trimmer, all of us could congratulate my sister Mary Jane on such a fine choice of a gift. Eager anticipation soon turned to horror when Dad suddenly gasped and made a funny squeaking noise like an animal caught in a trap.

His pale blue eyes got really big and instantly filled with tears. The ugly truth was that the quality of the nose hair trimmer ended with the chrome plating. The rotary blade inside the cylinder did not fit snugly...in fact it was very loose so that when Dad spun the little knurled knob, instead of being severed, the hairs spun with the blade. Now, nose hairs hopelessly entangled in the mechanism, and in great pain (tears rolling down his cheeks), he sought help from my mother.

Mom, hearing the commotion, met him in the hallway leading to the kitchen and took the scene in: the bulging eyes, the tears on his face, the chrome-plated nose hair trimmer hanging from his nostril, and Dad doing his best not to sneeze. “What happened?” she kept repeating. All Dad could do was make little grunting sounds and point toward his nose. “Oh for crying out loud” we heard her say. And just as Mom and Dad never aired their disagreements in front of us, so too was the removal of the chrome-plated nose hair trimmer. It was one of those secret moments that spouses share.

Before long, Dad was back in the living room, red-eyed but none the worse for the experience. The nose hair trimmer no longer dangled from his nostril. We kids all noticed that although the device had inflicted terrible suffering, it had been effective! The treated nostril was utterly devoid of hair. Its twin, however, still had an unsightly clump.

Somehow, none of us could bring ourselves to suggest that Dad “do the other side.”