I should wear lipstick

We are late for an appointment with the oral surgeon. Since I had been to the oral surgeon's office multiple times over the past year and a half, I was sure I knew where the office was and arrived just in time ... at the dentist's office. By that point, I had realized that I was at the wrong building, but since I had also forgotten my cell phone, I decided to go to the dentist's office to ask for directions to the oral surgeon. "Hi, I have an embarrassing question to ask ..."

After the very nice receptionist gave me directions, we drove for another two miles to the correct office. It looks vaguely familiar. My daughter and I sign in at the oral surgeon's office and settle in for a wait. Apparently, we both decide to read something that seems interesting, in small, sporadic doses. She picks up one of the I Spy books. I pick up The New Yorker.

As she searches away, she is stumped by one of the descriptions. "Mom? What does 'pot-bellied' mean?" I look over at the book, thinking it might be referring to a pot-bellied pig. I am a little surprised to see that it reads, "Find a pot-bellied man."

I think about describing what this means, and realize I can do this very quickly, with very little effort. "This is a pot belly," I say, pointing to the squishy, pillow-like gathering of flesh that looks like it is sitting on my lap.

"Oh -- okay," says my daughter, quickly locating the pot-bellied man in her book.

Sigh.

Lice & DDT

We have somehow managed to avoid lice in our household, although I am not sure how. It seems to be rampant in our community, and my daughter's school sends home "the lice letter" with regularity -- I doubt if anybody even reads it anymore. When I told my mother that several of my daughter's friends had had lice this past year, she was shocked. "Here? Why would they have lice here? We never had to worry about that when you were little."

I thought back to my elementary school days in Los Angeles, and could remember only one time when I heard about lice: third grade, Robert Fernandez. I remember this because he was the only kid I ever knew who had lice.

"Did you have lice in Japan, when you were growing up?" I asked my mother. She answered in Japanese: "Oh, sure, during the war -- everybody had lice, kids and adults. But that was wartime! When the airplanes would come, we had to rush to hide in holes in the ground, covered by futon, all cowering together. You couldn't avoid it. Every night when we bathed, my mother would rinse our hair with vinegar, and comb cooking oil through our hair afterward. With four girls, this was a job all by itself.

"But I don't remember having lice problems after the war was over -- when the occupation soldiers came, they sprayed us all with DDT. They just lined us up and sprayed us, adults, kids, everybody. It looked like people had stuck their heads in a bag of flour -- our heads were completely covered with this white powder. Can you believe it? Makes me shudder to think about it now. We didn't know that DDT was harmful then. Besides, it's not like we could refuse to get sprayed ... but we didn't have lice after that!"

Okay, well that puts things into perspective. We'll do what we can to try to stay out of the lice cycle at our school, but if we do get any little lice companions coming home with my kids, we'll deal with it -- and be glad that we have never had to grow accustomed to the sound of bomber planes overhead.

Can't get DDT? American Academy of Pediatrics gives a thumbs up to malathion.