February 19, 2008

• I keep forgetting to tell you…

  This has turned into a three blog day, to my surprise.  I wrote the letter to my younger self last night on the laptop after I went to bed.  Today, I remembered that I hadn’t given you the latest Quest standings, and had to correct that oversight.

  Then, an entry by an excellent and admirable Xangan who had recently gone from having long hair to a short bob, mentioned Locks of Love and reminded me that I hadn’t told Xanga about my haircut.  I don’t know why it is that I keep copying links, or things like the “false” badge, and assuming that I can’t possibly forget where I found them, but I do, and I do forget.  [AHA!  It was indigolady.  She popped in and identified herself.]

  The last time I had a short haircut, it was a wedge and the year was 1974.  That was a high maintenance haircut.  Keeping the bangs out of my eyes would have required weekly cuts and I have never in my life been the kind of a woman who has standing weekly appointments at the hair salon.  My mother was, but I’m not.  I suffered through the growing out of that wedge.  First the bangs were in my eyes, then they were in my mouth.  I let it grow a few years until one night when I rolled over in bed and a lock got caught in my armpit and pulled.  That wasn’t just painful to my scalp, it pulled a muscle in my neck and hurt for days.

  I decided then that the ideal length for my hair was anything between just long enough to stay behind my ears when I tuck it there, and just short enough not to get caught in my armpit.  Some time in the ‘eighties, reading Tarot cards at the State Fair, I met Rae Maness, who ran a shop in Anchorage and had a booth at the fair every year, doing cuts, piercings, and hair and face paint.  She traded me a haircut for a reading that year and every year or two after that until she retired a few years before the turn of the millennium.  I miss her.  She knew what I wanted and never tried to give me a trendy or fancy do.  I got desperate for a haircut in 2001, and went to a shop in Wasilla.  I got something I didn’t ask for, and had another year or so of waiting for it to grow out, followed by a few years of wishing Rae were still in business.

  My hair was down below my waist by last December.  I had been so sick for months by then that I really don’t remember the last time I had brushed it before that ambulance ride to the hospital.  It was all snarls and tangles, and dirty, too.  After they’d gotten me stabilized in the ER and left me sitting on a gurney waiting to be taken up to my room, I brushed out my hair.  When I got to my room, I told the nurses I wasn’t going to get into the bed until I’d had a shower and shampoo.  It was a little inconvenient for them, because the shower had to be supervised by an aide and neither of the nurses who were there to help me into bed and get me settled could do it.  I sat in the chair and waited.

  During the 3 days in the hospital, I had daily showers and shampoos, and brushed my hair.  When I got back home, the showers came to an end.  Likewise, no shampoos.  After the steroids I’d been taking wore off, I could no longer keep my arms raised for the time it took to brush out my hair, and even when I tried to do it one bit at a time, the first bit would be tangled before I got to the second one.  I started thinking about cutting it.

  The last time I had cut my own hair had been over fifty years before, and I had butchered it badly, beyond repair, and wore a bandanna to school every day for months.  That experience caused me to doubt my competence to cut my own hair, even though I’d been cutting my husbands’ hair and my son’s for decades.  Desperation eventually overcame my doubts.  I had to get rid of some of that filthy tangled mop, and even if I had been well enough to get out of the house, I wasn’t going to a salon.  The only thing that could get this grungy body out of this house in this condition would be the paramedics.

  I loaded up on bronchodilators, and took advantage of the little bit of early morning energy I had, first thing in the day.  I sat on the side of my bed and spent a couple of hours working the tangles out of my hair, taking a breather whenever I needed one.  I parted it in the middle and drew each side into a pigtail, stood in front of the mirror, and cut each of them off at collarbone level.  When I brushed it, I found a long lock that had escaped and strayed down my back, and cut it off to match the rest. 

  I’m kinda glad I didn’t know about Locks of Love when I was standing over the garbage can, dithering idiotically over the monumental step of tossing out two long (over a foot long, I guess) dirty hanks of hair.  I’d have been ashamed not to donate my hair, and ashamed to donate anything that filthy.  What a dilemma I was saved from by my ignorance!

  I don’t know how it looks now, even though I do look in the mirror occasionally.  I am not qualified to judge my own appearance, beyond feeling more or less okay about it despite the grime and signs of age, but I know how it feels not to have to drag it out from under the blankets when I go to bed, or to helplessly watch as it gets more and more snarled while I’m physically unable to tend it.  It’s short enough now that I can brush it several times a day, and I do.

  …and please don’t ask for pictures.  Indulge my vanity.  If and when I gain a bit of health, and can shower and shampoo, I will consider posting a self-portrait.

  • 4:26 pm
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