MARJORIE ANDERSON
EDMOND — My dad pierced my ears with a hypodermic needle when I was a grown woman with children. It took place on a Thanksgiving afternoon. We’d left the family to clean up the dishes and gone downtown to the office expressly for that purpose. A bonding sort of thing, don’t you see.
We stood side by side in the cold examining room, he cleansed the equipment and his intended targets with alcohol, and then — more or less like throwing darts — he reared back and accomplished his mission. So much for bonding.
“If God had meant you to have holes in your ears he’d have included them in the pattern.”
My dad did have a way with words. Those are the ones he had used for years. Sure, I could have had them pierced professionally — and it wasn’t long after they healed that I did — but it was a matter of principle for me that my dad do it.
We were back at the house in time for Mom’s pumpkin pie and whipped cream. The piercings were drastically off center and my ears throbbed like the devil on the two-hour road trip back home, but I took solace in that Dad had agreed to pierce them at all.
The third piercing took place several years later, my first experience with a piercing gun. Two of them, actually. My California friend — who knew all that a transplanted Okie could learn in the 10 years she’d lived there — declared herself capable of shooting one ear at the same time the cosmetologist shot the other, thereby saving me the interim of dread between the two shootings.
I should have known better. Before she became a Californian, that particular friend had lured me into rocky situations more often than I like to admit, but there’s something in me that loves a challenge.
I considered it a dare, but once again I should have resisted. Bottom line: Both guns went off simultaneously as planned, but the one my friend was manning didn’t turn loose.
She screamed and I might have too before the professional took over and, as was her custom, Friend fled out the door to avoid the consequences. It took awhile, but the contraption eventually turned loose and the cosmetologist packed my ears in ice. I don’t like to believe those were giggles coming from beneath the hair dryers, but I promise you they weren’t coming from me.
Enough time had passed to obscure the memory of pain, so I had my ears pierced again last week. “Just try to avoid the cartilage,” I told the woman with the gun in her hand. She did, but one hole is higher than the other. When I called my ears’ unbalanced condition to her attention, she studied the situation, called in others to study the situation, and, after much deliberation, they took a vote.
The verdict was that the age of my ears was at fault.
“Lobe wrinkles,” said the practitioner, “maybe scars from past procedures. You’ve got more of whatever they are on the left one” (which would be the ear my California friend maimed) “than on the right one. The holes are even, they just don’t look like they are.”
Right, I thought, but at least they’re new and not stretched down to my knees, and wasn’t that what I was going for in the first place?
Victor Hugo said, “When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.”
Really! If grace is mandatory, my adorable, wrinkled old ears will have to miss that unspeakable dawn.
MARJORIE ANDERSON is an
Edmond resident.
