07 February 2009

samedi

"Wait..."

The woman paused, scissors poised to cut into the cloth between the one yard and the other 7/8ths of a yard. "You can buy less than 7/8ths if you want," she said.

"No," I said, "I think I might just buy the whole thing."

Watching her fold up the flannel with little red and brown polka dots, I continued, "I think I've turned into my mom. She always used to buy way too much cloth. We had a whole closet full of it at one point."

"It's really endearing when daughters turn out like their moms," she told me. "I love it when my daughters tell me that they do things just like me, as long as they are happy about it."

"I think my mom is amazing," I said. "I am really excited to become more and more like her."

...

Last time I got my hair colored, a year ago, the students at the Aved@ Institute gathered around and gushed over it. "This is virgin hair?" asked one guy with purple sparkly eye shadow out to his hairline while caressing my hair, "I've never seen virgin hair before!"

Apparently everyone colors their hair. (They should all be as broke as I was in law school! Uncolored hair would abound!) Looking around today, though, I saw many women with bleached platinum blond hair, getting it bleached all over again. I wanted to beg them to do lowlights this time. I was positively conservative having sandy and honey-blond put into mine, with the special gentle dye that they can use only on uncolored hair.

For one brief moment, right now, I have absolutely perfect hair.

...

In the last few minutes of sunlight, I sat in a little park, on a bench, with my owl notebook that I'm writing in these days. A tiny girl in a pink sweater with dark brown curls came over, trailed by two uncertain-looking older people. She pointed insistently at my notebook, talking in not-quite comprehensible words, and her people were too unsure to simply remove her from a conversation with a stranger.

"Owl." I said, and she echoed, "Ow."

"Blue tree."

"Boo tee."

I handed her my pen, and opened the notebook to a back page, where she scribbled for a bit until I took pity on her grandparents, who were clearly uncomfortable with the stranger concept, and took the pen away so they could pick her up and carry her, screaming, to the other side of the park.

When placed on the ground, away over there, she ran straight back to me.

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