On Chin Hairs, Sam Hill, and the Stories We Collect

Jean has a talent for taking the small, ridiculous indignities of aging and turning them into stories that make people laugh, nod, and mutter “oh thank God it’s not just me.” In this piece, she tackles one of the great universal mysteries of womanhood after a certain age: the stealth chin hair. Along the way she wanders into euphemisms, Michigan history, hormonal betrayal, and the sacred friendship pact involving tweezers. It’s part rant, part folklore, part confession — and Jean at her silliest best. ...AI

How in the Sam Hill do whiskers on women over a certain age manage to grow three inches long before — with great embarrassment — you finally see them in the mirror? I look at my face with a magnifying mirror every morning. I wash my face every night. I see my face in between when I refresh my lipstick or wash my hands. Still, it’s always when I’m driving to an appointment or running errands that I’ll glance in the rear‑view mirror and see a foot‑long, gray chin hair waving at me like it’s hitchhiking. I swear these things grow overnight like they’re auditioning for the stage production of Jack the Beanstalk.

Someday I’m going to rear‑end someone, and when the police officer asks if I was texting, I’ll probably say, “No sir, but do you happen to have a pair of tweezers? I can’t get a mugshot taken with this mile‑long hair on my face.”

Turns out I’m not alone in this battle. One of my fellow residents here on my continuum‑care campus confessed recently that she has an agreement with her daughter: every visit includes a mandatory chin‑check. She hates to see old women with long, curly strands of hair bouncing up and down as they talk. Don’t we all? Especially when it’s on our own faces and we’re trapped in a car with a chin hair that’s trying to get us killed in an accident.

I’ve resorted to keeping a pair of tweezers in the car because there’s something about the light coming in from all angles that makes those stray hairs pop like neon signs. Not that it makes them any easier to grab. They like to play peek‑a‑boo in my chicken‑like wattles, darting in and out like they’re training for a covert ops mission. Yes, I know I could go to one of those fancy waxing places, but for one or two stray hairs, is it really worth what they charge?

And speaking of things that sneak up on you, here’s a tangent I promise is connected: did you know the “Sam Hill” in the “How in the Sam Hill…?” euphemism was an actual person? If you didn’t grow up hearing it the way I did, you may not know it’s basically a polite stand‑in for “what the hell.” It’s one of those versatile expressions that can convey confusion, exasperation, or disbelief. “How in the Sam Hill am I supposed to know that!” or “How in the Sam Hill did you do that!”

According to Google, Sam W. Hill was a 19th‑century surveyor and mine developer in Copper Harbor, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He was well known for his “colorful vocabulary,” which is a polite way of saying he swore like a lumberjack with a stubbed toe and a pint of whiskey in his hand. His friends and neighbors would retell his stories but substitute “Sam Hill” for the cuss words. From there, the phrase spread beyond the Keweenaw Peninsula and somehow survived all the way into the 21st century.

It amazes me how euphemisms born before radio, before TV, before social media still manage to hang on. Maybe the slower pace helped them stick? Maybe clever phrases had time to settle into the language instead of being replaced every three seconds by whatever TikTok is doing today. Or maybe Sam Hill was simply the 1800s version of going viral — just slower and with more flannel.

According to AI, the fine, wispy facial hair on the chin and jawline of older women is caused by “shifting hormone levels — specifically, a drop in estrogen alongside a relative increase in androgens during menopause.” I am well past menopause, but I was recently prescribed estrogen as part of my sleep apnea treatment, which begs the question: Why in the Sam Hill am I still growing chin hairs? Perhaps instead of applying the estrogen cream down there, I should try slathering it on my chin.

And why in the Sam Hill is it socially acceptable to poke fun at the biological realities of menopause? I don’t know who first said it, but I’ve never forgotten the joke about The Friendship Test: it’s about which of your friends will pledge to come to the hospital if you’re ever in a coma and pluck your chin hairs. I tried to Google the origin, but there were dozens of references in blogs and TikTok videos. So instead of going down that rabbit hole, I decided to vent about this First World Problem by writing about it too.

Aging hands us plenty of indignities, but it also hands us stories — and the older I get, the more I’m coming around to realize the stories matter far more than the stray hairs ever will. And if the day ever comes when I’m too old or too out of it to pluck my own chin hairs, I hope someone I love will lean over my hospital bed, sigh dramatically, and say, “Well, Sam Hill help us — she’s sprouted another one.” ©

See you next Wednesday!

A Kiss, a Memory, and the Long Road Between Then and Now

Jean has always believed that memory has a mischievous streak — especially the kind triggered by music. One moment she’s driving to the grocery store, minding her own business, and the next she’s dropped straight into a full moon‑drenched scene from the 1960s involving rum, steel drums, and a kiss that would age into something far more complicated than it felt at the time. What follows is her attempt to braid that long‑ago moment with the world she lives in now, and the distance between the two...AI

Music has a unique way of hooking us up with memories buried deep in years past. When a song manages to bring a vivid memory alive, you can’t help but marvel at our brain’s computer‑like ability to retrieve data our conscious self had long forgotten. That’s what happened to me on the way to the grocery store when Riley Green’s voice came over the country station singing, “...I know I can’t stand or sit, but if I was hammered, could I dance like this?...I ain’t as think as you drunk I am.”

I can count the number of times I’ve been truly drunk on the fingers of one hand. And all those times were in the last century — the 1960s, to be precise. There are different kinds of drunks, and I was a happy drunk, the kind who wanted to be on the move, dancing and singing. One particular time I was on vacation with another twenty‑something girl down in the Bahamas.

If you’ve been to the Bahamas, you might remember, as I do, the buttery‑smooth rum and the steel drums those notes rang like laughter as they tumbled through the warm air while the rum settled me into my happy place. As I remember it, it was the kind of intoxicating combination that loosened my world at the seams, making everything feel a little softer, a little friendlier — the perfect prelude to that warm, tipsy, rum‑drunk joy with a side of “I love you, man,” delivered to bartenders, strangers, and possibly a palm tree.

And to the Black taxi cab driver who delivered us back to our hotel that night. After he opened the taxi door and let us out, I gave him a long, deep kiss, much to his surprised delight and much to the disgust of my friend. Later she said she couldn’t believe I actually touched a Black man, much less kissed him shamelessly. And in a public place, no less! It was sometime after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law and before the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was passed, better known as the Fair Housing Act. But in my friend’s world, Blacks and whites mixing was still a sin.

Try as I might, I can’t remember her name or what she looked like, but I still remember that taxi driver’s sparkling eyes and wide, toothy smile as he enjoyed my drunken state as much as I was. 

It’s a sad statement about how limited my world has been that when I got home from that vacation, I’d have to fast‑forward to when I moved here, four‑and‑a‑half years ago, before I’d have real contact with Black people again. And those in my daily life, now, are all employees of my continuum care community — the wait staff, the cleaning staff, and our CEO. As a flaming liberal I, of course, loved having Obama as our president but that's not the same as actually talking with someone from another race on a daily basis.

When I see our very capable CEO at our monthly Dialogues, standing in front of my fellow residents, his skin as dark as the night, I can’t help noticing the irony: a Black man confidently leading a room full of old white people in a country where that simple image would once have been dangerous, even impossible. I sometimes wonder if he feels that history humming under the floorboards the way I do.

The universe has a way of pairing my life experiences so neatly that it often feels like a deliberate plan to call attention to something I might miss otherwise. When I got home from the grocery store with that feel‑good memory still lingering in my mind, I went to a lecture here in our all‑purpose room. It featured an Abraham Lincoln impersonator who put on a fabulous one‑man show about the Civil War.

There’s roughly a hundred years between when the Civil War was fought that ended slavery and my trip to the Bahamas, and over another half‑century between that trip and now. Still, I’ve always been proud of the fact that my generation has done so much to move race relationships forward — although I’m not sure Black people would see the progress in the same light as most whites do (not to mention the backtracking our current administration is attempting). In terms of history, it wasn’t all that long ago when a Black man would have gotten strung up to the nearest tree for kissing a white woman, even if he wasn’t the one who initiated it. Few days go by when I don’t see someone hug our CEO. I wonder what my long‑ago travel companion would think of that. Has she changed over the decades, or does she still hold onto the belief that races shouldn’t mix? Is prejudice so deeply ingrained in some of us that we can’t change?

I didn’t know where this post was going when I started, but somehow it feels like I’m at the end except for saying that sometimes a silly, rum‑drunk memory from sixty years ago can remind you how far we’ve come, how far we haven’t, and how strangely a single impulsive kiss can echo across a lifetime. And looking back now, I can finally see what I couldn’t then: the kiss was never the scandal. The scandal was the world that insisted it should be. ©

See you next Wednesday!

Memorial Day, MAGA Men, and the Art of Living Together

 

In her ongoing chronicle of life inside a Continuum Care Community, Jean returns to Memorial Day with equal parts honesty, humor, and hard‑won perspective. What begins as a reluctant decision to attend a campus ceremony becomes a meditation on patriotism, personality clashes, and the strange intimacy of communal living. Along the way she encounters the usual cast of characters — the generous, the sentimental, the maddening, and the unforgettable — and finds herself, almost despite herself, grateful for the complicated little world she now calls home…. AI

Last year I skipped our Memorial Day event here at the Continuum Care Campus (which they hold four days before the holiday but that's the way they do things to give employees time off with their families). I had two reasons for skipping it, and I’ll quote myself from the post I wrote back then: "I couldn't bring myself to go because a guy from my building planned to read the entire Constitution, and I'd have a terrible time hearing it from the lips of a rabid Trump and MAGA supporter. And two, because I felt like a fraud last year singing along with all the patriotic songs when I wasn’t all that proud of our country. Asking God to bless our ‘Great Nation’ felt like pretending we were still the same beacon of freedom and hope we used to be.”

I’m not alone in avoiding this man. At our Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner event (more on that later), I learned that at least half a dozen residents have asked the dining staff never to seat them with or near him. He’s surly, swears at the servers, and tells anyone who asks about our Independent Living community, “Don’t come here. It’s awful.” His bad attitude started when management informed him that we are a gun‑free campus and his massive collection had to go home with his sons or they'd take legal action to evict him. He still warns people that we’ll be sorry if a mass shooter storms the building because he “could pick them off from his balcony.” A surly old man with a gun. What could go wrong?

This year I still didn’t want to sing God Bless America. Blessing America when our leader behaves like a spoiled child feels a bit like saying, “You’re doing great — here’s your reward.” But I decided I shouldn’t let one person keep me from honoring the other veterans who would be participating. We have roughly a dozen Vietnam vets here, all of them former commissioned officers. You can draw your own conclusions about why that is, but I suspect it has something to do with the upper‑middle‑class backgrounds that CCCs tend to draw from. During Vietnam, these men had families who kept them in college long enough to get deferments, then commissions. A couple have even admitted they enlisted after college so they could choose their military branch and job rather than wait to be drafted into the infantry.

This year our Life Enrichment Director took the lead instead of Mr. MAGA, and the difference was noticeable. She read a lovely two‑page essay which I later learned was written by Artificial Intelligence. When I complimented her, she said, “I put some ideas into ChatGPT and let it compose something much more eloquent than I could.” She also read three poignant poems and showed a nine‑minute video titled Flanders Field: Remembering Their Sacrifice. The YouTube description says it “serves as an orientation to the Great War, the cemetery, and the American Battle Monuments Commission.” Several of the clips from black‑and‑white newsreels shocked me — and I don’t shock easily. The image of hundreds flag-draped caskets waiting to be loaded onto ships took my breath away.

Near the end of the Memorial Day event, our LED invited anyone to share a story about their own service or that of a loved one. Five or six did. Mr. MAGA did not. And while I still refused to sing God Bless America with the others, I was glad I went.

The next day brought a very different kind of gathering: the 90th birthday party for our resident retired lawyer. He has two sons and a daughter and a gaggle of grandkids and great-grands and 17 of them flew in from all over the country. They have a charming tradition of a nightly 7:00 p.m. Zoom call — sometimes twenty people on the call,  other times just four or five but they’ve never missed a night in the four and a half years their dad has lived here. The party itself was first‑class and catered and everyone who lives or works here was invited. He and I both moved in the first week the CCC opened, and I can’t imagine this place without quirky him and his generosity. While I might donate ten or twenty dollars to various collections, he donates a hundred. Five hundred. A thousand. He calls himself the Mayor of our CCC and insists on sitting at the head of any dining table. He also has tender ears and will flee the room if anyone mentions menopause or female anatomy issues. He's also sentimental and cries easily and he didn't make it through the party without shedding tears. Yes, we have characters here.

Speaking of characters, I promised to circle back to our Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner event. Communities like this naturally form cliques — nothing malicious, just people gravitating toward others with similar interests. You often see the same four to six people eating together. But these cliques aren’t exclusive. Anyone could call any group and ask to join their reservation, and they’d make room. New residents are routinely invited to various tables as we get to know them. We even have unofficial ambassadors who make a point of introducing newcomers and connecting them with people who share a background or hobby.

A couple of high‑octane women decided to shake things up. They created a sign‑up sheet for anyone willing to sit with someone new, then they matched us into mystery dinner groups. We didn’t know who we’d be eating with until we arrived at the dining room. It was something like speed dating — not that I’ve ever done it, but I’ve seen it on TV — in that we all asked and answered the same questions: Where did you live before this? What was your career? Where did you go to college? Kids? Grandkids? Hobbies? Two people at my table found out they both taught in the same school district and knew some of the same people. 

This is the third year we’ve done a 'Guess Who' dinner, and I enjoyed it twice. The year I didn’t, I was seated with Mr. MAGA. This year he didn’t sign up, so the rest of us were free to enjoy the excitement of meeting people we knew by sight and name but had never had a real conversation with. And as the two lady organizers say, "If you don't click with your assigned tablemates, it's just ONE dinner." 

Community living isn’t always peaceful — it’s more like being adopted into a sitcom you never auditioned for. But weekends like this remind me why I keep showing up anyway. Between the veterans, the birthday party and the mystery dinner, I found myself oddly grateful for this cast of characters. Even the ones who make me mutter under my breath. Maybe especially them. After all, every good ensemble needs at least one antagonist to keep the plot moving — and to give me blog fodder. © 

  Flanders Field: Remembering their Sacrifice