More on Soviet Absurdities.
Though, to be honest, I don’t know if these are Soviet, Eastern European, or Jewish. Superstitions isn’t even quite the right word. They’re more like stories or legends meant to scare you out of doing something. And the more I think about them, the more I’m tempted to say they’re Soviet, because so many seem to be a byproduct of the circumstances.
Today, I got my hair colored. When they washed the color out, they used cooler water, which is apparently better for the color. And immediately, from some deeply buried corner of my Soviet childhood, came this:
Don’t wash your hair with cold water or you’ll get lice.
I legitimately believed this. Maybe that’s why I still take really hot showers. Somewhere in my brain, I may still be afraid that cold water = lice.
Which makes absolutely no sense.
But where did that come from? Why the legend? Why the fear?
Every summer, the hot water was turned off where I grew up. That’s when they did maintenance. It was only during the hottest months, so why not, right? We bathed with boiled water, mixing it with the cold water from the tap until we came up with something tolerable and vaguely resembling the temperature you’d actually want touching your body.
So is that where the cold-water-gives-you-lice legend came from? A way to make sure kids didn’t just give up and wash themselves in cold water? To make sure you remembered to mix in the hot?
I have no idea.
But whatever its origin, it worked. Decades later, I’m sitting in a salon in America, getting my hair rinsed with cool water and apparently still waiting for the lice.