I was pushing my grocery cart through the Weis supermarket in Long Neck. True, it wasn't a satellite in my usual orbit around the Food Lion in Milton where people know me or sort of understand me, but I had dropped off a package at The Mail Stop next door, where Judy Romani works as the best packer/shipper ever. I also needed a parsnip for the soup I was making, and they're really hard to find around here. Does anyone but bohemians and gypsies like me ever make soup from scratch anymore? It was then that another woman pushing her cart approached me. "No one ever uses parsnips anymore," she said.

This pronouncement seemed benign enough. Were we about to trade recipes? Usually, women assume I don't know the first thing about cooking, even though I once catered lunches at my husband's office, because the lunches I packed for him looked so good to the other men. The men I talk to in grocery stores are usually a lot better than women shoppers, saying upon seeing my exotically loaded cart, "That's a lucky man!"

Once a woman started to ask me a question about cooking over the bok choy. She took one look at me and said, "Oh well, you wouldn't know." Anyhow, to get back to my story, the woman at Weis (who looked like Dr. Deborah Birx, who wore Hermes scarves as she delivered COVID updates), said, "Why do you wear your hair so short?" Maybe she was the doctor I used to see on TV, but she wasn't wearing her scarf. As I remember, Dr. Birx had a beach house near Selbyville, but I admit that I do not take jellyfish brain supplements to enhance my memory.

I'm sort of used to this kind of thing, so I was prepared, saying to the Weis woman, "Because I want to, lady!" As she clutched her chest in alarm, she said, "Oh well, I didn't mean anything; it's just that if I had hair as thick as yours, like a fur coat, I'd want to wear it long. My own hair isn't as thick as yours." She bent over and tapped her scalp, her long locks (a little too long for her age, I thought) cascading down her shoulders. This, I suppose, was a backhanded compliment meant to defuse her unsolicited advice which I had countered.

The incident brought back memories of the scene in the movie “Witness,” where the tourist woman in Pennsylvania Dutch country asked Harrison Ford if she could take his photo. He answered, "If you take that photo, lady, I will rip off your brassiere."

Recently, a well-coiffed woman who had just had a perm said to me, "I'm really vain about my hair, and I guess you're not?" Mine is not a fancy hairdo or even a mom-mom do, revealing no visits to the hairdresser or even the barber, but, yes, I am vain about my hair.

Does anyone remember Priscilla Wilkerson's hair salon about a hundred years ago in Milton? Her attempt at perms for me just fell out and turned my hair orange, but she was one of my grandmother's Bingo friends. Another beauty shop much later cut the top of my head in a curve even after I said I didn't want it to look like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. No, I wanted it boxed off like the Marine sergeant in the TV series “Gomer Pyle, USMC.” She also got out this noisy vacuum cleaner and suctioned off very short clipped hairs all around my head like I was at the Poodle Boutique and Spa!

I used to walk down a very secluded rear entrance into the Prices Corner Shopping Center where mendicants lingered and asked people for money. Every once in a while, one would say to me, "Can I ask you a personal question?" And I would answer, "No. No, you may not."

So to all the well-meaning people who are concerned about my hair, I am vain about it, believe it or not. I was in a shoe store one time where a hairdresser with magenta hair gave me a recipe to bleach my hair myself. It worked, and along with using my husband as my barber with some electric clippers from Walmart, I have saved a ton of money!

And, yes, neither my mother, nor my mother-in-law liked my avant-garde, short blonde hairstyle, but I do get my share of compliments when it's freshly bleached and glowing like a light bulb! Back in the 1970s, I was the first to have purple hair in Sussex County when no one else had it, becoming known as "The Purple Painter Lady." Maybe some of you can remember back that far, with or without jellyfish capsules.