Getting the Wrinkles Out

I never really aspired to be a domestic goddess. One of my favorite pictures is of me at 10 years old sitting in the dirt with my best friend, who was a boy, playing with our pet rats. My mother was, I think, a very wise woman in that she mostly let me alone to become the sort of person my genes were telling me to become, but she did make an effort to instill some level of skill in homemaking. I did the dishes, I helped her clean the house, and I occasionally helped her prepare food. She used to simmer ground beef in tomato sauce to pour over spaghetti, for hours and hours it would bubble slowly on the stove, and there would be pools of reddish fat floating on the top which I loved to skim off.

She taught me to iron. Back then, steam irons had not yet been invented, or if they had, we certainly didn't have one. I was taught to dip my fingers in a bowl of water and then flick the water on the clothes and then roll them up so the water could permeate better and then commence ironing.

Thanks to the sorts of fabrics available today and our personal lifestyle that does not require us to dress in business attire to go out to work, I don't have to do too much ironing. But given that I am obsessive about not throwing anything way, I do on occasion have to iron the wrapping paper I have saved from previous holiday events to get the wrinkles out. Which I did some of last week so I could get the gifts we had bought for the relatives in the West wrapped. As it happened, I only had to actually wrap one present, because gift bags have also been invented in recent years. This is such a blessing to challenged people such as myself who are horrible at wrapping presents. Just horrible.

So now I'm wondering when someone will get around to developing an iron to remove facial wrinkles. People have come up with all sorts of procedures to help women keep wrinkles at bay and many over the counter concoctions that may or may not also help. On occasions over the years when I was a janitor for the local post office, I acquired expensive bottles of stuff that had been thrown away. One such little bottle, which I still have, has a list price of $80 and promises to reduce wrinkles with daily use for 14 to 21 days. The bottle is about 90% gone, and only recently did I bother to look at the ingredients; among them: marine collagen, numerous chemicals (some of which I am familiar with from my work on a dermatology journal), amniotic fluid, placental protein, calfskin extract. Hunnnh? Amniotic fluid? Placental protein? Alrighty then.

I don't think it works, but I did not do a scientific test. And I am no longer sure I want to put this stuff on my face. Perhaps I will just let nature take its course...