The Pink-Bonnet Girl

While reading Jeff Wick’s recent column “What I learned in Kindergarten” printed in the Record, I also had a flash back which I relived – tears and all.

Do any of you know what ring worm is? Then you know how itchy and red and burning this is especially when a little six-year-old girl with long thick hair had ringworm on her head.

My grandmother had told me “Do not go into the barn. Don’t play with the kittens.”

I did anyway. I thought she would forget or not see me.

All six of those kittens were darling and so hugeable.

I then heard some loud stomping on the barn floor.

There stood my grandmother. Her black eyes were glaring at me like hot coals and her lovely complexion was very red.

“Norma Carol, didn’t I tell you not to play with those kittens?” she asked.

When my parents came to get me, we went to a barber shop.

I couldn’t stop scratching even though my head burned like the fire in my grandmothers’ eyes.

“It all has to come off,” the barber said.

So, my long golden curls began to drop to the floor and my mother began crying and left the room. My dad sat quietly holding his hands.

The next stop we made was to a doctor’s office where he said, “Yep, it’s ringworm and we have to remove all of it from her head.”

That’s when I began to cry.

The doctor heated a wide strip of adhesive tape over his wall heater, wrapped it tightly around my head, then yanked it off, and I screamed bloody murder.

I looked in his mirror and my head was smooth as a boiled egg.

My first day of kindergarten was two weeks away. My mother and I both were panicky about me attending with this bald head of mine. I was a shy and quiet person already, and I decided I was not going to go.

I wanted to die. My aunt Lois heard about my unique predicament. She visited and told my mother she had solved the problem with a little pink “something or other.”

She had made me a bonnet. On my first day of kindergarten I was the center of attention. Little shy me actually felt kind of important. I was known from the first day on as “the pink-bonnet girl.”

At the age of six I was already turning heads thanks to my aunt Lois.

Could there be a more unique first day?