Now Somewhere in the Black Mountain Hills of Dakota...

We have two kid hairbrushes hiding around the house. I say hiding because they never seem to end up in the same spot twice. Rach would probably disagree, but that's just because she uses them more often and is more responsible than I am. That's neither hair nor there, though (I don't apologize for that...I embrace my heritage as a 12th generation punster).

There are a couple features of these hairbrushes that, when I find them and actually use them to tame the kids' hair, I love. The first is that they're incredibly soft. Why is it that when I grew up, I traded in a nice, soft-bristled brush and started using the human equivalent of a dog deshedding comb? That might explain my current follicular situation. The second is that the back side of one of our current kid brushes is the face of a lion (not a scary lion, mind you, but a pastel, cute, cuddly lion which, if released into the wild, would be slaughtered by a wildebeast).

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One morning, when I was in preschool or, possibly, kindegarten, my mom ushered me out the front door and down the driveway to our car. Before buckling me in, she placed her tupperware lunch container and my soft-bristled, brown and white raccoon hairbrush on top of the car.

I loved that hairbrush, with it's raccoon tail handle and Ranger Rickish raccoon face. It was awesome!

With me buckled in and ready to go, my mom slid into the drivers seat, buckled herself in, started the car, and off we went to work and school.

I don't recall when she realized what had been forgotten. I don't recall when I began to miss my little raccoon friend. I do recall, though, that when we arrived home that evening, a neighbor brought us back our tupperware dish and the remnants of my Raccoon, which he had collected from the street not far from our house.

The tupperware survived the assault of concrete with few scars. The hairbrush did not.

Gone was the raccoon tail handle, gone was an ear, gone was the delicate details of his nose. Despite the obvious trauma of the experience, though, his bristles were still soft and pliable; his heart still full of a sense of duty, which is why, a few months later, he was awarded the Purple Comb for being wounded while serving. In the years that followed, he overcame the limitations of the injuries suffered on that fateful car ride and continued to serve my follicles well...as well as you could serve follicles in a constant state of cowlick.