Hair Pollution

As a child, I learned from my Grandmother Florence May Banham Stern to clean my hairbrush, with a comb to remove the stray hairs, and to wrap them around my finger. She put hers into a round Deco-design amber-colored plastic box made especially for that purpose. It sat on her glass-topped mahogany dressing table, where she kept the annual school photos of all us kids - slipped between the wood and the glass. Her commodious bedroom was papered blue, with long-stemmed Navy and red carnations running diagonally from floor to ceiling. I put my swirls of hair into a plastic margarine tub through a hole I’d cut in the center of the lid. It sat on a small chest in a bathroom I'd paneled with aromatic cedar closet lining. Not as elegant as my Grammy’s Deco tub, but about the same size, and satisfyingly serviceable.

As a young woman, my hair hung lower than my hips. One morning, mid hair-saving ritual, my daughters asked, “What’re you gonna do with all that hair, Mom?”

“Someday, I’ll stuff a pillow with it, so you can pass it down the line to your children and grandkids.” The thought of it made them scrunch their noses.

Eye-rolling was perfected that day along with deep sighs of disgust and disbelief.


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At the Healing Light Center Church, in the 1980's, fellow long-haired student Joe Janosko and I got to talking about this ritual, for some reason now lost to me. He assured me it was far kinder for the environment to collect hair than to put it outside. Many people do, put it outside Joe told me. He was a Viet Nam Vet with a port wine birth mark covering half his face a brilliant deep blue, purple and magenta. He had a distinctive limp where a war injury had fused his right hip to the femur. Gentle soul that he was, he explained that birds pick up stray bits of hair like the ones I described all curled around my finger. It is soft. The birds line their nests with it - unwittingly subjecting their young to those treacherously tough tendrils, which can wind around a wee wing, cutting off the blood supply thus deforming the developing bird - or worse, strangle the little hatchlings.

I'm still waiting for the sewing elves to complete that pillow stuffed with Gran'Ma's tresses for my granddaughter. Right now, the hair collection, that ranges from auburn to Bozo-red, to silver-white, resides in two large zippered plastic bags at the back of the sewing closet.



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As the spectacle of Donald Trump holds a lens to America’s values, I’m beginning to think that hairspray must contain lead. Surely these heavy metals account for his idiocy. My husband asks that this “birther,” who demanded that Presidential Candidate Barack Obama show proof that he was born in the United States, produce a similar certificate showing origin of his (Trump’s) hairpiece. Certainly, what’s under that toupee is polluting our air-waves and engendering hate. Talk about heir pollution! His daddy must be turning over in his grave.

Every day Trump holds court in his buffoonery, is a bad heir, hair, and air day.