write-your-own friday : hair

When I studied abroad in Germany in 1981, we traveled for two weeks into a rainy, dark country called East Germany. The trips across the border were frightening, guards in long thick grey woolen jackets boarding the train heavily, then staring at your passport and then up at you for too long, before allowing you in. Or out. One guard peered at my passport, then up at me, then back again. Several times. Finally, gruffly he ordered me in German to hold up my hair. Puzzling, until I remembered that in my passport photograph, my hair was up in a ponytail.

All of us felt a certain unspoken weight had been lifted when we reentered the world we knew by crossing a single tiny line in Berlin two weeks later. We dashed to post offices to place calls home, each needing in some way to say "I'm back, I'm still alive, I made it out."

It was in Berlin after that experience that one evening the women on the trip gathered in one of the larger rooms in the old pension where we were staying, to sit in a circle cross-legged, each facing the woman in front of her, and each brushing and fixing the hair of the girl whose back she faced. Brushing and fixing each others' hair.

My friend Howard (p. 222, Life is a Verb, smile) wandered by the open-doored room and stood watching. "It's like watching a group of monkeys groom each other," he said, finally, with his trademark crooked smile. And so it was. Perhaps the urge to reconnect was so strong, or the urge to look after. 

This week's prompt is "hair." What are your stories about hair? Do you remember having it cut at the beauty or barber shop? Did you ever cut your own hair? Have you shaved it or colored it or wished it were curly or straight? Can you tell the story of how it feels to have someone else brush your hair, or the story of when you cut your own bangs, or the story of losing your hair to chemotherapy? What are your stories about hair?

Go here for write-your-own instructions.