A Haircut and a Bag of Hair

As a child, I was never sure which mother my own personal "wheel of fortune" would land upon on any given day. There was the fun-loving and happy mother; there was the hidden-under-the-covers-in-deep-depression mother and several mother-characters in between. Every morning, the wheel spun to determine my fate for the day. On those days when I hit the jackpot, the wheel landed on the fun-loving, happy mother. Those are the memories I prefer, the ones I cling to. When my mother laughed, the world was a safe, happy place, crime went down in major cities, wars came to an end and the sun shone brightly on the world.

I remember a time when Happy Mom took me to the mall with her for a haircut. We went inside, had our hair styled--probably in Farrah Fawcett wings--then did a little window-shopping—well, she window-shopped, I begged relentlessly for new clothes. When we finally made our way to the exit to leave, it was raining buckets, a real gully washer in West Texas terms. We looked at each other with our freshly styled hair, shrugged our shoulders and decided to make a run for it. This was back in the days when no one ever thought of locking their car doors, a real bonus when it was pouring rain. We made a mad dash for the car, the rain pelting us with a vengeance. I ran as fast as I could, giggling to myself because Mom was lagging behind and she would be so much more soaked than I would be. I spotted our car, ran around to the passenger side, threw open the door and jumped in, slamming the door behind me.

I looked through the windshield just in time to see my mother running lickety-split right on by our car. I watched as she kept running until she was invisible to me through the downpour. I dissolved into laughter because she had missed our car. I laughed out loud—long and hard, all the while staring out the window expecting her to come running back to the car, wet and bedraggled, at any moment. The rain started to slow down a little and by then I was beginning to get curious about where she went. Still amusing myself with all the witty comments I would greet her with when she finally showed up, I again looked out the front windshield, and for the first time noticed that right there on the dashboard was … a disposable diaper? How weird. Why would there be a diaper … wait a minute … I looked to my left and saw, instead of the clean front seat of our car, a supply of tissues, both new and used, two Old West paperback novels, and... a bag of hair? Not a wig, not a hairpiece, but a clear plastic bag full of hair. I couldn’t get that car door open fast enough. I flew out of that car—some stranger’s car. And when I say stranger, I mean stranger, because what could be stranger than to carry a bag of hair in the front seat of your car? Who does that?


My mother’s car was easy to recognize thanks to the sight of her doubled over, laughing like a hyena as she sat in the driver’s seat of her own car, with no bag of hair and no diaper on the dash. I nonchalantly opened the door and hopped in as if I had just been taking my time getting there. But she wasn’t buying it—her laughter was so infectious that even in my humiliation I had to join in. In fact, we both laughed so hard that we were halfway home before I said to her, "Wait, you don't even know the funny part." Then I told her about the bag of hair. That threw us into fresh fits of laughter that lasted well into the night. Throughout the evening, one of us would glance at the other one and giggle, priming the pump for a new round of uncontrolled laughter. Happy Mom was really happy that night.


And me? Well, I still wonder about that bag of hair from time to time.