Haircut 100

Little sweetheart, I need a haircut! It’s been ages. Two years! I know!

I actually had planned to get one right after Christmas. I was at your parents house in your beautiful room sitting on your bed when I emailed the girl who’s been cutting my hair for the last bunch of years. She wrote back right away and said, yes, she could do me as soon as I got back to New York, just call Seagull (the salon where she works) to schedule it. So, a few days after New Year’s, when got home, I did. And they said she was on indefinite leave. That she was on a trip around the world rock climbing. Seriously. I follow her on Instagram and, there she was, hanging from a boulder with green hair, somewhere in Texas.

But I’m so fussy and loyal, I wanted to wait until she got back. I thought I might finally suck it up and try to find someone else around my birthday in April but then, of course, I got plowed over by some guy driving his car and wound up nearly dead in the hospital.

Thankfully, my angels - you foremost and guiding them, your earthly and celestial charges - intervened and now, four months later, I ambled down to the West Village (it’s been so long Seagull had actually moved - from their old storefront on W10th Street to a place twice as big on the second floor of a building tucked away on W4th) with Sylvia in tow to get shorn by someone new. Everyone was really nice. The receptionist remembered me and our new guy, Topher, knew all about pulmonary embolisms and even the medication I’m on. He and his wife also really like cooking, so we had a lot to talk about.

As I sat there and Sylvia snapped pics on her phone and sent them to your mom (who was relived - one of the occupational therapists at the hospital had fashioned my hair into a man bun atop my head and even your mom, ever polite, had to exclaim that it looked awful), I couldn’t help but think of you and the first time I was shorn at your own behest.

You’d directed me to Lee’s, just down the street from your apartment in the Inner Sunset, insisting that I’d look so much better with shorter hair and a good deal less “like a crazy old man”. I was a bit startled in the stylist’s chair that day, reaching to the back of my head to discover how short it was but when I got home to you, you embraced me instantly saying “I love it” and making everything better, as you always always did and still do.

So, two years (or is it nearly three now?!) on, I’m finally back to a neater look. You, Sylvia and your mom cam all breathe a sigh of relief, I think. I’ll join you. Girls, the best ones, are always right, after all. Isn’t that so, little sweetheart?