I have always felt vulnerable when sitting in the beautician’s seat and I am sitting in one now. The vanity lights around the mirror are bright and unforgiving. The kimono smock is snapped snug around my throat. I never know how these gowns are meant to be worn, open front to back or back to front like a straightjacket. I’m vacillating between excitement and dread. The potential for a good cut is there but it can veer into disaster just as easily. Also, what to say to the beautician? Offer small talk or ask her how she really feels? I feel I am disappointing her for not looking chic. Each Fall before the start of grade school my mother took me to Mr. Lee, a barber who cut both of our hair in the same exact pixie style and sprinkled glitter in mine. I know a lot more about the meaning of hair now then I did then, its seductive power, its telling of each person’s personality, its nurturing capability. Back then I had a plastic horse with a faux-fur tail who lived under my bed in a pretend stable. I would lie flat on the floor half hidden under the mattress slats in the ‘stable’ and, while humming, entranced in my own world, comb and set its tail with hairpins and curlers. When I was twelve, I begged my Mother to buy me a wig at the Salvation Army store. I stood in front of the mirror in the middle of the aisle becoming a curly blonde or a long redhead imagining the possibilities. With a wig I was transported from downtown Springfield, Illinois to being a Hollywood movie star disembarking from a jet plane. The camera bulbs would be flashing. I would flip and toss my hair and agree to sign autographs. My mother yanked me by the arm and said the wigs were dirty like old rugs. Once as an adult I saw an exhibition of maritime life in a museum in Newfoundland. It had a fishing net from the 1700’s made entirely out of human hair. The placard said it was made with more than 10,000 strands of women’s hair collected by villagers and used for several generations of fishing families. Its span was more than twenty yards wide. It fed the villagers for years and was nurtured in return by the families who cared for it, repaired it and passed it on generation to generation. It was next to a grainy black-and-white photograph of a toothless old woman mending it with a crochet needle between her gnarly fingers. Some time in the 60’s my mother changed her hairstyle to a beehive or French curl as she called it, lacquered with layers of hair spray. Touching her hair was, from that point on, off the table. At night she would wrap toilet paper around her head to keep it in place as she slept. I had a head massage once from an acupuncturist. It was at a time in my life when I was lonely living in a strange town. I wept when she touched my hair and scalp. There is nothing quite like a good head massage. To surrender into another person’s hands. To be cupped like a baby in someone’s palms.