Do you have the irresistible urge to know a secret? Maybe the secret is better left unsaid. I learned the hard way some years ago that I really don’t want to know everything.

We had been making weekly visits to our friends who had four young children. The next to youngest child had a penchant for playing with combs, brushes, and make-up. She wanted to be a beautician. This beautiful little girl no more than six, was always playing beauty shop with friends and family friends. I was her next target on our next visit.

The bathroom of this small house opened up to the dining room. If the door was open, everyone could see you and vice versa. So upon leaving the tiny rest room, the little girl grabbed me by the hand and said, “Come back and sit on the side of the tub, and I’ll comb your hair for you.” She was most animated and insistent. The family encouraged me to do her bidding as it would make her happy.”

I sat down and she picked up what I thought was a diminutive little brush. The family smiled and watched as their daughter made swirls of my hair and would then make a mess of it only to start all over again.

Maybe you’re like me, you hate people laughing at you. But since it made this little girl’s evening, I dismissed their occasional pointing and smirking and encouraged her to continue. I was proud that she was comfortable enough to ask me if she could “play” with my hair, or whatever was left of it.

Our evening ended as it always had done. Hugs to everyone, and we happily drove our sixty-minute drive home. That episode of hair combing was never repeated and I found out why four years later.

The mother of these “blessed children” never had the courage to tell me the rest of the story. Now revisiting them after we had moved away, she confided there was a huge reason for their earlier laughing and pointing.

She said they were horrified when their daughter had mistakenly taken their new smaller toilet brush and began using it as the main prop for her beautician encounter with me. She told us while we were oblivious to it, she and her husband were aghast. Following our visit, they promised each other never to tell us the truth, the whole truth, or nothing of the truth.

Now that we had moved away, she felt safer to tell us with a little glee, the rest of the story. Now four years removed from that night, I think back on the episode with a little shudder. I used my pillow case every night for another week. Was the unexplained pollen I thought I found in my hair actually flicks of toilet tissue?

Maybe the greatest lesson learned from this incident is, I may have found a reason why many of my friends say at times I appear a little flush?