I love early morning appointments for personal services. And by personal services, I mean places like nail and hair salons. I am not sure why, but it seems like everyone is in a better mood early on.
Perhaps we are all early risers, and that’s why we are so friendly. We’ve already had our coffee and quiet time, so we are ready to start the day.
For example, I was recently at the For Your Nails Salon, in the Fred Meyer Shopping Center in Lacey, at 9:00 am and was delighted to see that every other customer there was a senior. We were all getting Manis and Pedis.
There were four of us, and while the staff remained pretty silent most of the time, conversations between the clientele started up almost as soon as we arrived.
For openers, the television was set to an Asian cooking station and the conversation centered around that. There is always soft music playing in the salon, so there was no volume from the television. While we couldn’t hear what the cooks were saying, everything they made looked delicious.
When I asked my pedicurist for the name of one particular dish being shown, she informed me it was a Korean program, and she was not, so she did not recognize the dish, but agreed it looked yummy.
Soon the conversations turned to the nail colors that were chosen and why. Some of us had upcoming events to attend, and some were just treating themselves to a couple of restful hours.
Total strangers bonding over new adventures in cooking, personal appearances and preferences. I may never run into this bunch of ladies again, but I passed a very pleasant couple of hours with them.
Fast forward to this week, and you would find me getting a haircut at Salon 360 in Olympia. Haircuts are always pretty traumatic for me. I have very fine hair, which is also very thin, so trying to find a style that makes me look as if I have any hair in the first place is not easy.
Michael Lerch is the owner and was my hair stylist for this visit. Before he arrived, I was talking to another customer, Michelle (no last name, please). Michelle lives in Rochester and is the manager of a housing complex in Lakewood, and comes to Salon 360 to have her hair done.
She was telling her stylist about her vacation, which she was still enjoying. Up to this point, her vacation had been spent doing all the things she didn’t time to do while she working.
So far, she had cleaned her gutters, and power-washed most everything in sight. She gave credit to her maintenance crew at work for tips that made these jobs easier.
This led me to share when I was the Director of Senior Services for Southwest Housing, in Texas, I had twenty properties across the state to visit, and since this was pre-GPS days, was always lost. All of our properties furnished transportation, which I also managed, and a quick call to one of my bus drivers bailed me out many times.
We also agreed our maintenance teams were the true unsung heroes. Since they are the ones that enter the apartments, they often alerted management to problems before they could escalate – like the time one of my maintenance men came to tell me he had fixed something in Mrs. A’s apartment and noticed her trash was full. He offered to take it out for her and, while doing this, noticed some empty cat food tins in her trash.
Mrs. A did not have a cat.
By the next day, however, Mrs. A was enrolled in a free fresh food program provided by a local non-profit, signed up for Meals on Wheels, and the local Elder Abuse office had been notified they needed to visit her to offer other possible services.
If you are wondering why I called Elder Abuse in, it is because the single highest incident for elder abuse is self-neglect. Their social workers will come in, access the needs, and do everything they can to help the senior remain in their home as long as it is safe to do so.
Around this time Michael arrived and we got down to business. He had a suggestion for my cut that immediately put my mind at ease and we moved onto other subjects.
By the time I left with my stylish ‘new do,’ we had covered traffic in the San Francisco Bay area, gay and civil rights, our families, and mothers in particular, and how lucky we were to have them for role models. And of course, we discussed haircuts, and products, and although he sold them at his salon, which ones I could find at Costco, cheaper.
I love my new ‘do’. All in all, it was a great way to start my day.
Kathleen Anderson writes this column each week from her home in Olympia. Contact her at kathleen@theJOLTnews.com or post your comment below.
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