Different Drum: Bandana wearing symbolizes hard work ethic
After staying up too late on Thanksgiving Eve, phoning some friends, my son tiredly ambled downstairs Thanksgiving morning. He tentatively popped into the kitchen long enough to size up the status of my home kitchen holiday food preparation operation, complete with large kettles, crockpots, roasters, sauce pans, cutting boards and miscellaneous utensils. He looked at me engulfed in cooking chaos, the bright purple, paisley handkerchief print bandana atop my head radiating “to-do rag” or “dew-rag” (versus simply “do-rag”), and he burst into laughter.
“You know there’s gotta be some serious work going on when my mom’s got her bandana on!” he announced to no one in general. “What is it with you women and your bandanas?” he wanted to know. “Are they some sort of warning signal to stay out of your way because you plan to move mountains today?”
“Precisely,” I told him. “And in this case my bandana provides the added bonus of preventing my hair from getting into the food I’m making,” Silly boy. He has a lot to learn about women, food safety and busting your butt crack at the crack of dawn to ensure you’ve prepared enough turkey, gravy, stuffing and potatoes for a crowd.
“My girlfriend and her mom do the same bandana thing when they’re trying to get a lot of work done,” he reported. “And I’ve seen other women do it, too. So it’s starting to seem like some kind of a universal behavior among females.” Perhaps we were all inspired by Rosie the Riveter. I’ll have to get out my Rosie socks and wear them along with my bandana.
“Yeah, my mom doesn’t wear a bandana just when she’s cooking,” my son continued mocking me. “She also wears one when she’s taking care of recycling, mowing the lawn, scrubbing the tub and doing other household tasks. She can’t work hard unless she’s wearing a scrap of cloth on her head.”
Well, there was some truth to that. There’s nothing more annoying than trying to work hard and having your hair fall into your eyes. A bandana worn sweatband-style prevents that from happening. Folded in triangular-half and worn Babushka-style, a bandana also protects me from tree branch and bush attacks and the dust I kick up when I’m mowing lawn. Further, I like that if I overheat, I can unfasten the bandana, turn it inside-out and use the clean interior of it to mop the sweat and dirt from my eyes. A bandana also absorbs blood quite well, too, when the need arises.
If I were really cool, I would master the art of wearing a bandana as a sweatband, with a baseball cap or cowboy hat resting atop it, but alas, I’m not that cool. I’m also not cool enough to pull off a bandana in that grunge way Johnny Depp and Bret Michaels make look so effortless. I end up looking like a cross between Aunt Jemima and Raggedy Ann: hard-working; non-threatening.
Never was I more in my bandana-clad glory than during the summer of 2011, when I was without a year ‘round full-time job, so I could spend endless days in the fields of our family’s farms, picking specialty crops by hand, while by night cranking out dozens of resumes and cover letters. I went through so many bandanas in the hot sun, bent over five-gallon pails (into which I was tossing ripe jalapeno and banana peppers) that in order to have a clean bandana, I had to borrow a couple bandanas that belonged to my dog. And yes, I have gone out in public, proudly styling my dog’s attire.
My favorite image is a photo taken of me, glistening with sweat, all stooped over a row of jalapeno peppers, wearing a formerly white sleeveless shirt and denim Capri pants, with one of my trademark bandanas folded into a strip that’s tied neatly around my head. You can’t get any more real and hands-on than that: doing whatever it takes to support my family
If you would have asked my elementary-aged (at the time) kids what my super power was, they would have claimed, “It’s all in her bandana. Without one she would be powerless and accomplish nothing.”
— Kristy Smith’s Different Drum humor columns are archived at her blog: diffdrum.wordpress.com.
This article originally appeared on Coldwater Daily Reporter: Different Drum: Bandana wearing symbolizes hard work ethic
