The hair is the important thing

My hair stylist seemed particularly pleased with her handiwork this time, and asked if I had anything exciting planned for the rest of the day.

"I have to go to the nursery and get flowers," I said, "and then plant them."

She looked disappointed. "It's a shame you have to be out working in your yard, with this terrific haircut," she said. "Don't you have anyplace more glamorous to go?"

"Does the grocery store count?"

She sighed. "Well, at least when you're out there at the nursery" -- here she looked upwards and began to wave a brush around -- "the sun will shine on your beautiful hair, and the copper tints will glitter when you swish your hair around, and you'll look just like an advertisement," she waxed rapturously.

But although the sun did shine while I was at the nursery, no one appeared to notice my hair. Obviously I did not swish it enough.

With that disappointment behind me, I tried to concentrate on choosing my flowers. Since the flowers in other customers' carts always interest me more than the ones in my own, I'm thinking someone needs to implement a fast-food take-out system for nurseries, in which you can just go up and down the line of customers waiting to check out, point to what you are interested in from their carts, and say "I want one of this, three of that, a couple of this one," etc., and voila -- in a few minutes the staff would bring it all to you, and off you would go, after suavely handing over the equivalent of a college tuition for everything.

Or better yet, nurseries could have a select grouping of flowers already IN the waiting carts, and you could just get the whole lot at once. It would really cut down the amount of mental -- and physical -- work you have to do. Kind of like the way a certain family member, in his bachelor days, would buy whatever outfit was on the mannequin, because he was assured that the items all went together in a cohesive manner, which he could not be sure of if he were to depend on his own intuition.

But in the absence of any of these options, I resorted to choosing flowers according to my usual custom:

1. Find several white and yellow and pink flowers to complement all the purple already in my yard. Give self strict orders NOT to buy any more purple flowers.

2. Select several purple flowers anyway, because they are too pretty to pass up.

3. Get more white and yellow and pink flowers to offset all the new purple ones.

4. Get a bigger cart to hold everything.

5. Head to the checkout. Refrain from looking at any more flowers along the way.

6. Look at everyone else's cart to see what they have that I didn't notice earlier.

7. Immediately regret that I didn't pick what they did.

8. Spend the rest of the time in line deciding whether to get out of line and go start over again. Continue to wonder this even after flowers are loaded in car and I am driving home.

9. Arrive home to realize that, really, I don't have THAT many purple flowers.

10. Sigh, plant flowers, and remember to swish hair in the sunlight.