Hair, Chapter 3: Theirs

All three children came out bald. Just blond baby-chick fuzz. Just enough nest on top to bury my face and breathe in.

When they grew enough of a crop, cornsilk golden, they got bowl cuts. I used incentives. I’d start telling a story, made up, with shocking twists and turns, and as long as the child held still I kept going.

Nothing gold stayed.

I figured out how to do all-over trims on the boys. Always the same cut, the right amount of ragged to tag us as pinch-your-pennies diehards. When fourth-grader(?) Christopher, wising up, pleaded for a mohawk, I said no. I now think it was wrong of me, but I’d probably still do the same thing. And the time we came home from somewhere to find he’d played barber on Zachary, I had a fit. That, too—my hysteria—seems wrong. Gutsy boys, smart boys—what more does anybody want?

(With Jennifer I did more plaiting than snipping, though not for salvation’s sake. Fold over, fold over, smooth, pat, sigh and moan, borrow from a plumper hank, fold over, tug tug, down to the lustrous tail ends.)

Then came their theirses’ turns.

It still happens, every so often—me getting a stab at one or another, just the youngers, mostly the sons. Once, maybe last year, I nicked the one here, the sole male carrier of his daddy’s genes—his ear—and had to fall over myself apologizing. A bloodied body part, yet Grandboy continues to present himself for shearing. Possibly he harbors a lust for danger.

That stuff on the floor, lopped from its roots, no longer draws hairy looks, unwanted pat-downs, ire for its weight. Scorned and shorned, it’s just some sad dust.

(Video footage and layering—Lady Gaga—by Grandgirl)