A Good Audience

We're very different, the woman who cuts my hair and I. But we get along swell, I must say. I got a haircut very early yesterday, so early I hadn't even had breakfast, but that was OK because there's a new little gourmet food place across from the hair salon that I could go straight to after the haircut. (I'd go to a regular haircut place for the old-world masculine solidity of it, but they don't understand curly hair in those places.) I settled in and we talked about scones for a while. I mentioned blueberry, she mentioned something like lemon ginger. This gourmet food place glowed in my mind: If you go to that part of town feeling hungry in the morning, you start to think about it and eventually you just go get a scone. At least I do. It's like the event horizon of a black hole—at a certain point, you're a goner.

Then the subject of my age came up and she did a very creditable impression of a person who was surprised to hear how old another person really was. "I had no idea!" she said. But talking that way has to be the first thing hair people learn, or they're not allowed to get licenses. I'm sure if I had said, "I'm negative 11. I won't even be born until 11 years goes by," she'd drop her jaw and say, "No! Get out! I'd have said you were much younger than that!" But still it felt good.

She mentioned that she'd had a first, the other day. A customer began wriggling under the cape they put around you, and the stylist asked if she were OK. It turned out she wasn't OK at all—her water had broken. I decided to myself that there wasn't much point in trying to speak genteelly, given the subject, so I said, "Cleanup on aisle 5!" I also observed that I don't know much about such things and don't really want to learn. We went on to agree that you can be a perfectly fine person and still not want to have kids. We started by listing ourselves, and then other people we knew. She's in her twenties, recently married, but in no hurry to devote her life to a child. And personally, I just never felt the desire. The world is being populated adequately without any additions from me. And while I think life is very beautiful, there are bad days, and if a kid ever said to me, "I didn't ask to be born!" I wouldn't really be able to argue the point.

So anyway, we talked and laughed about this and that. We crack each other up, she and I. And I trust her completely. I have to, because once I take off my glasses I'm effectively blind. I can't watch her in the mirror and say, "Hey! Don't cut that bit!" or anything. All I see are moving blobs. Anyway, she finished up, had me inspect her handiwork, and we went over to settle up the bill.

At that moment a 5K run had just started, and for a minute we watched a solid stream of runners come around the corner. We didn't say anything, just watched as this mass of outstandingly fit bodies flowed by, limbs pumping and thrusting with pent-up reserves of energy, lean and taut as greyhounds.

The stream thinned out. "Well," I said meditatively, "I guess I'll go get some pastry." And bless her, she threw her head back and laughed.