A younger man approved my then long hair, telling me he wished women wouldn’t cut their hair the minute they reached a certain age.
Approving his approval, I kept it long awhile, perishing the thought of looking middle-aged. I decided to cut and run from the vanities one fine August day among the gnarled stumps of an abandoned cherry orchard. Thrusting shears into the hands of nymphs who cut their own and each others’ hair at the merest provocation, I was reborn.
Since then I’ve shorn my coif ever shorter, sometimes feeling more artsy than elderly, other times not so much. The crone goddess stalked me still, until a couple of nights ago when my dear old mother visited me in her June Cleaver garb, a dream I told my sister...
'I dreamed I was sitting at the dining room table with you and Dad and Mariah and Mom. We were smiling and talking, Mom had flesh on her bones and her hair was brown. Mariah was young, in blond pigtails. I went over to Mom's end of the table, gave her a big hug, told her I missed her and we all missed her and loved her and I'd thought she'd died, but here she was with us. She just kept smiling her beautiful smile. She was wearing a beige cardigan and plaid Scottish skirt, maybe pearls. Hugging her sideways as I looked across the table at you guys, I felt Mom smooching my cheek continuously, like a happy child. I said to you sisters, 'this isn't real is it?' and Mariah, grinning back, said, 'nothing's real, Susie!' We all seemed to think that made sense. I woke up, thinking of love.'
If nothing is real, then everything might just as well be real. My sister’s take on the dream gives an artist pause. She said:
'I'm listening to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He talks about reality - how we can't really take it in - we take a few grains of sand of it and that's our reality. There's so much - so much.'
I guess that’s what art does. Excavate, death defy, populate the world with seers. There are muses, in pearls, waiting to smooch us unabashed into the light.
Painting by Paul Gauguin, La Baignade
- Susan Weber's blog
- Login or register to post comments
Hair
Hair seems to be such an important piece of identity for many women (something marketers dwell on); we associate it with something important about being female, and many women have strong opinions about the hair on their bodies as well as their heads - Eve Ensler gives us a piece in The Vagina Monologues; and plenty of women with thinning hair, due to medical treatments or otherwise, talk about grappling with the issue. It's so interesting to me that this is something so important to many of us - especially because men have the same ability to grow hair as women do - and I'm always curious about what it means to women.
In Asia, many women who grow older cut and curl their hair - poorer nutrition growing up makes their hair fall out as they age, and darker hair shows up patchiness easier. One topic of conversation among Korean women, when I lived there, was whether and when they would cut their hair short - it's interesting to see a similar idea across the ocean. If we associate shorter hair with being less female - what does that mean about how we think about aging? An interesting idea. . . .
__________________
'Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.'
Neil Gaiman, Sandman
bonfire of the vanities
Susan, I really like your writing style, for example, this sentence in particular, in which you characterize (I presume,) your nieces -- this is very vivid:
"Thrusting shears into the hands of nymphs who cut their own and each other's hair at the slightest provocation, I was reborn."
__________________
Water Color Visions