Folks are cutting their own or their family member's hair, or both, for better or worse, until a vaccine is found for this dang virus or until safety can be assured while visiting our favorite hair salons to meet with our favorite hair dressers.
I have, for better or worse, been cutting my own hair and my husband's hair and beard for years. Our daughters used to line up for their mama cuts when they were little ones. I took lessons from watching my grandmother's rituals around hair grooming.
Grammy Florence Stern had hair down to her mid-calves in 1914. She wore it piled on top of her head. While I wasn't born until 1948, she told me stories of how she and her eight sisters used to care for their tresses. On her dresser, Grammy kept a six-inch-diameter porcelain receptacle with a small hole in its lid. It was made in Japan. Into it, she placed spent hairs that came out when she brushed, cleaning out her hairbrush after each session. She would wrap those hairs around an index finger and pop the circle of then white, instead of deep auburn, hairs into the decorated hair receptacle.
Habits die hard. Once OCD, always so? I keep an empty two-pint-yogurt container with a small hole cut in its lid in a cupboard in my bathroom. Into it... you guessed it! Over the years, I've collected a double-sheet-set sized zippered plastic bag filled with my own curled 'round my finger hair of various lengths and colors - from hip length to shaved-neck length; from henna red to "all white with me" colors, and everything in between.
Our older daughter performs live storytelling at venues like The Moth and Bawdy Story Tellers of San Francisco. She once told a story of coming across that bag of saved hair and asking me what I was going to do with it all. I promised her I would make a pillow stuffed with it for her and one for her sister and even one for the granddaughter! Story-teller Mosa recalls her initial horror at the thought. Then she had an idea. She began combing her cats and saving their hair. She stowed it away in plastic bags thinking someday she'd make a pillow of cat hair and give it to her sixth-grade arch-enemy Terra - a girl who'd stolen something of Mosa's and lied about it. Turns out Terra was terribly allergic to cat hair or dander or what ever makes allergic people break into hives and sneeze until their eyes swell shut. Mosa was looking forward to the reaction.
Like so many childhood dreams, the thrill of seeing terrible Terra suffer was replaced by some other more productive dream. I wonder if she still has the saved cat hair?
We have a friend who left Los Angeles fifteen years ago to get away from the insanity of not just the city but of television madness. Elyssa worked in TV game shows with my husband for several series over the course of decades. She retired to Oregon where she bought a working sheep ranch. She always was a productive knitter. She had a herding dog in LA whom she named Molly. Molly had very long fur for a dog, and Elyssa saved the dog's hair/fur for a good long time, carded the fur, spun yarn, and with it ultimately knit a dog-hair sweater!
I always wondered how it smelled in the rain?
I do love the scent of lanolin and how wool smells when damp.
When do I plan to make pillows filled with my saved hair? Perhaps right after I finish sewing together the cut out patterns for protective face-covering-masks. The cut pieces have been unproductively sitting on the sewing machine since mid-March when the Shelter-In-Place order came down. Have the good elves yet finished those masks? No, they have not. Will I ever get to complete them? Perhaps not... which means the pillows will be manifest in some distant future, maybe completed before I turn ninety or ninety-nine. Only then will I divulge to the daughters and granddaughters that having my hair in the form of a pillow will magically grant them supreme wisdom as they sleep, because my gray matter has been pushed out into each and every one of those gray hairs. Won't they be surprised to be suddenly SO much smarter? Hah! That's where all my wisdom has gone! Into my gray hair... although, I do prefer to say, "It's all white with me!" Thus is the curse of a pun-dit. With OCD!
I think I'd better shampoo all the saved tresses before bundling them into pillows. I do want those women to have sweet dreams!
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