The Great Barrette Chase

I was cruising through the mall this morning, checking off errands like, er, er, well I don't know what checking off errands could be like, but I was getting them all done.  I had only one task left:  to find a couple of long barrettes. 

You see, aseveral months ago, I decided to grow out my hair, and now it's grown out.  I know that for someone like me who can't do anything with her hair, that seems counter-intuitive.  It seems like short hair would be easier and more consistant to maintain, but if you have short hair, you have to do things like blow it dry and keep it cut.  These are beyond my state of motivation.  I've been very happy letting the tresses get long, and it's currently brushing my shoulders.  For a while I worried that it was unsuitable for a woman of my, well, let's face it, of my years.  You can say what you like about not caring what other people think, but I don't think any of us wants to look stupid.  At least, I don't.  Then on our way to Disney World, I saw a woman with snow white hair who had tucked up in back with a flat, red double bow.  It looked like a barrette, and I stopped to talk to her to make sure it was.  Even I can twist up my hair and snap on a barrette.  She had her hair up neatly, and it looked perfectly appropriate.

Shortly after that, I was at the mall and stopped at the hair accessory kiosk.  I think I wrote about how the nice woman there showed me elegant things I could do with my hair.  If I didn't, I should have.  She spent a lot of time with me, and I ended up with two ways that I could ("could" being the operative word here) fix it.  I bought a beautiful Swarovsky crysal barrette from her to wear with my blue suit to David's wedding.  It is quite sparkly and gorgeous, but her barrettes aren't for everyday use.  When I was at the grocery store, I bought gel to tame the wisps, but there were no barettes big enough there.  That leaves me with one faux tortoishell barrette and one with a gray fabric bow on it. 

Do you have any idea how difficult barrettes are to find?  Claire's didn't have any.  Icing had the gray fabric one, and the drugstores have the tortoishell ones -- these are the same ones I used 40 years ago.  That's it.  How boring is that?  Somehow in my head I had the image of a silver-tone filigree one and, maybe, a gray one with a black line desing on it.  Where do these ideas come from?

From now on you can think of my, like Diogenes with his lantern, searching, searching through the stores for for intersting barrettes.