Yesterday at the Salon with My Stylist for Life

The guy who cuts my hair is very young. Forty, maybe fifty years, my junior.

When I walked into the salon yesterday, he was sitting, his flowing hair around his shoulder, fanning himself. He had on short shorts, a sleeveless t-shirt and Birkenstocks. The short shorts revealed some of the tattoos I hadn’t seen before including one of Winnie the Pooh. He right away twisted his hair into a bun, told me the air conditioner died, and it was 80 degrees in the salon.

It felt okay to me. But I nodded. It’s what I do when I’m with him. Then we moved to the room where he was to wax my eyebrows. I laid down and he regaled me with all of the issues and conflict and decisions he had to make because the salon was closing. It was a running commentary, accentuated by him ripping the wax strips off my brows. And then, just like that, we were done with brows.

Next my hair. It had grown crazy and unwieldy in the two months since I’d gotten it cut.

“So, what are we thinking?” he asked standing behind me, looking in the mirror.

“I don’t know. Short. Very short. But not short like the time I asked you to make me look mean.” I’d asked him that because there were people in town coming after Street Angels about our giving people tents. I needed to look and feel fierce. We are our hair, right?

Then we stopped talking because, you know, I have to take off my cochlear implant receivers to get my hair cut. “Are we done talking?” I ask. Yes, he nods. And then he starts.

His hair cutting was mesmerizing, the scissors, the comb, the sections, and at the very end, the trimming of individual hairs on my head using a tiny razor. The result was the most perfect haircut, short, molded to my head, feathered in the right places. Exquisite. I am not exquisite, but my haircut is.

When all was done and I was paying up, I said, “You know what I want even when I don’t.” He said this in response, which I think I will remember for a very long time, “And I always will.”

God strike me dead if I ever think of going to someone else. We are bound for life now.