OPINION —
Our shower drain kept getting clogged. It was a big problem. We had to hire a plumber. He came out twice.
God love him, the plumber did not look happy the second time. Namely, because our house is 100 years old. Meaning, five generations of people have been bathing in this house. The drain pipes have been whisking away one century’s worth of funk water.
“No telling what’s in those pipes,” the plumber said in a quiet, ominous voice, gazing into the treacherous blackness of the drain hole.
The plumber and his young assistant, Charlie, spent an hour working on the problem. The plumber is not a tiny man. He did a lot of bending over while Charlie would laugh, pointing at his boss’s partially exposed gluteal cleft, and saying, “Crack kills, boss.”
They located the clog.
Charlie found me in my office. He was breathless and excited. “We found it!” Charlie said these words in the same weighty tones NASA engineers would use to say, “Houston, the Eagle has landed.”
Three of us stood in a tiny bathroom, looking at the source of the clog, lying in the plumber’s hand.
“I’ve never seen a ball of funk that big before,” said Charlie.
The clot was a rat’s nest of human hair about the size of a golf ball. The hair was old, so it just looked black and green.
“Probably your wife’s hair,” said the plumber.
He’s probably right, I was thinking. My wife has the longest hair in our house. Moreover, I’ve seen the aftermath of her showers. Whenever she washes her hair, the shower stall looks like she’s just finished bathing a border collie.
So, I told my wife about the ball of funk. She became very defensive.
Her main defense was, “It wasn’t MY HAIR!”
I had to laugh. Her thick, brunette hair comes down to her mid-back. Who else’s hair could it be?
“What about YOUR HAIR?” she said. “YOUR HAIR is clogging the drain.”
That’s absurd, of course. I reminded her that my hair isn’t nearly long enough to get stuck inside a two-inch drain. My hair is short, reddish and fair, like Robert Redford’s.
So we bought a rubber drain-stopper device from the hardware store. This device guarantees that it will catch 100% of all hair that might otherwise go down the drain.
We used this gizmo for five days before gray water started backing up in the shower. This meant it was time to empty the filter.
So, I removed the drain stopper. The amount of hair it collected was staggering. It was another epic-sized ball of funk. Only this time, the hair was newer, so you could tell what color it was.
All the hairs were short, fair, reddish hairs. Chest hairs, leg hairs and armpit hairs. Millions of them. There was not one brunette hair in the entire ball. All the hair was mine.
I was shocked, of course. I had no idea I was capable of causing such horrific clogs.
My wife, the former Sunday school teacher, delivered the moral of today’s story:
“And why beholdest thou, the single, solitary strand of hair clogging thy neighbor’s shower drain, but you payest no mind to the matted, prehistoric wig that has completely backed up thine own plumbing?”
Sean Dietrich is a columnist, humorist, multi-instrumentalist and stand-up storyteller known for his commentary on life in the American South. His work has appeared on “The Today Show” and in “Newsweek,” “Southern Living” and “Reader’s Digest.” His column appears weekly in newspapers throughout the U.S. He has authored 18 books and more than 4,000 columns. He tours his one-man show throughout the U.S., makes appearances on the Grand Ole Opry and hosts the Sean of the South podcast.
