I rarely venture into the baby section of my local pharmacy. The sight of baby shampoo, diapers, and ointments brings back traumatic memories of washing my kids’ hair and bodies after their daily battles with spaghetti, tomato sauce and everything else they managed to insert or apply anywhere but into their mouths. But the other day I took a wrong turn and accidentally found myself in the baby aisle. I was looking for a good shampoo that wouldn’t make my scalp crawl from the winter dryness that is inevitable living up here in the frozen North. My first glimpse of J&J’s classic yellow bottle of baby shampoo brought fourth involuntary waves of the aforementioned nausea. Then I noticed that the company had also launched an “older kids” version of its “no more tears” shampoo in a blue bottle entitled “no more tangles” shampoo + conditioner. Hmmmm…..no nausea…and the price was right, substantially less expensive than the adult-brand shampoos.

I also noticed on the same shelf, Murray & Lanman Florida Water cologne (reputedly America’s first home-grown cologne, dating back to 1806). What it was doing in the baby section beats me, but it was the first time I had seen it in Canada and was in fact preparing to order a bottle from Giovanni (Barbiera Italiana) in Florida!

Also in the baby aisle I found cotton swabs on wooden sticks. Geez, I hadn’t seen these in years and had just about given up looking for them. For chronic ear probers like myself who hate the feeling of water in their ears post-shower, the wooden cotton swab is the Holy Grail because it allows you to dig more firmly and with better control than the Anti-Christ plastic swabs. And, yes, before you start the nasty comments, doctors advise strongly against all swabs except for the periphery of the external ear, because of the risk of damage to the ear drum. But as George Burns replied when asked what his doctor thought of his cigar smoking in his nineties…. “My doctor’s dead!”. Now, what these wooden-tipped WMD’s were doing in the baby aisle beats me….even I would never use them on a kid.

All this to say that if you haven’t been down the baby aisle in some years, its worth a go…there are some real treasures hiding there, misplaced I suspect by bored, zit-faced, teen-age stock clerks who can still remember when they had a bowl of pasta on their heads. And BTW, the “no-more-tangles” is terrific.