Nasal throw rugs

Several years ago, I had a colleague who was known for one highly distracting characteristic: long nasal hairs. Those hairs sometimes stretched halfway down to his upper lip. I always asked myself why his wife didn’t do something about it. But that may have been a lot to ask for. Rumor had it that she didn’t have much to do with him because he was a chronic womanizer. She simply let him provide her with a nice house and life, and let him do whatever else he wanted as long as he kept up his end of the financial bargain.

When we had staff meetings, I often had trouble concentrating on what our boss was saying because of those long hairs. I had a barely suppressible urge to jump across the table, pull out a pair of nasal hair clippers, and go to work. Of course, I simply had to tolerate the situation.

Instead, my mind busied itself with all the things someone could make out of those hairs. For example, a sweater for his wife’s Chihuahua. Or a pair of net stockings for her. The fellow was nearing fifty and sported clearly salt-and-pepper hair, including those nose hairs. That opened the option of sorting the hairs into piles of white only and black only bunches, and weaving together white stockings for Monday and black stockings for Tuesday, or the opposite. It didn’t matter as long as the hairs got used for a good purpose.

The hairs were also so numerous and dense that they could have been used to make even larger items such as salt-and-pepper throw rugs for the bathroom, or Holstein-patterned living room curtains, or polka dot men’s underwear, even though I suspect they might have been rather scratchy.

Even though I haven’t seen the fellow for 9 or 10 years, I often think about those hairs. They were simply too real and too good (or bad?) to forget. In the depths of winter, I even wonder whether those hairs might have made wool-warm socks. I should have asked the fellow to save up a couple of bags for me to weave together.