Itching To Get By
Wednesday - July 18, 2007
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Del.icio.usIt was 6:18 p.m. when I received the call on my cellphone. I was getting ready to leave work as my wife was going out to dinner that night with friends who were moving back to the Mainland. I wanted to get home and take care of dinner for our kids and my mom.
My wife was on the phone and by the first sound of her voice I knew something was really wrong. I couldn’t imagine what it was as we were coming off a major high. Five days before that we were at a Turtle Bay condo as our 10-year-old daughter’s dance troupe was competing in a Tahitian dance competition.
They won first place in their categories, and after months of hard practice and furious costume design we were all ecstatic over the win. Nothing could take that feeling away except for what my wife was about to tell me.
“Ron, I just got a call and there’s a rumor that there was an ‘uku’ outbreak at the competition within the girls in our troupe.” At that point all I could think of was the past five days and all the contact I had with our daughter and the places she slept.
We are a cuddling kind of family, so there was no way I could not have contracted a head full of lice. My wife said she had to leave for her dinner but that she wanted me to rush home and delouse our daughter’s hair and everything she might have contacted.
My drive home was excruciating as I suddenly had the urge to scratch every inch of my scalp. When I walked through the door I was pleasantly surprised that our 18-year-old son had taken the initiative to lovingly wash his baby sister’s hair multiple times. He was applying mouthwash to her scalp, which supposedly gets rid of lice. This allowed me to go through the house and strip all the linens off the beds and remove the towels from the bathrooms. I started what would end up to be five loads of laundry.
My son, my mom and I conferred over the situation and determined that our baby did not contract any “ukus,“or not that we could find anyway. Better to be safe than sorry. As I finished the last load of laundry, my wife called on her way home from the restaurant.
“Ron, I just got off the phone with everyone and it was a false alarm - there were no ‘ukus,‘I repeat,there were no ‘ukus.’” Although relieved, I was suspicious of the whole situation. Either it was a vicious rumor or a diabolical way to get me to do the laundry.
Ron’s WEBSITE OF THE WEEK
Lisa Ann Dumovich, our effervescent office receptionist, is also the author of a celebrity cookbook. Proceeds benefit AIDs prevention and care. Some of the recipe contributors are John Travolta, Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor and Donald Trump:
Cook up your best websites and send them to me at:
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