Day 3,709—Summer Stories XII: Good Hair Day—

Today, I was thinking I would do the old 20-mile loop where I go to Grant’s trail via Gravois and take it all the way back through the Riverway. I cut it a little short and did closer to 18. Around mile 13, I looked down and saw my watch had just ended and saved my run, so I had to start a new run.

It was nice having the water fountains open for once. I am so used to not depending on them anymore, but I relished getting to stop and get my fill on the two main spots on Grant’s trail. During the run, I spent a lot of time reflecting on the year and the past. Also, thinking about how tomorrow is both Bloom’s Day and Father's Day! How crazy is that? I was listening to Ulysses a bit this week, thinking about the holiday. I got an amazing recreation of the first edition a couple of years ago. I’ll read from it tomorrow morning in honor of the day. It might seem trivial to some to care so much about books but for me those early books were my best friends. I felt seen in those stories in ways I never felt in real life.  

Yesterday, I kept forgetting what day of the week it was. I kept thinking it was Saturday. My daughter and I watched Inside Out together, something I wanted to do with her. Not that I am suggesting watching movies is a great bonding pastime, but I loved going to movies with my dad and brother growing up. We would always celebrate the holidays by going to the movies, and those were some great times. They all even indulged me for my birthday one year and we went to the Lone Ranger movie even though everyone hated it, but I loved the Lone Ranger as a kid and would dress up like him and gallop around our house. If anyone asked me who I was, I would say, “I am the lone stranger,” which to this day I think is a little more accurate than the “lone ranger.”

Back in the day, my hair was short, and my dad would give me a military “crew cut” almost every two weeks. My nickname growing up was “spike,” for a while because I would use hairspray and make my hair spikey.

When I turned 13, I was on the water polo team, and I decided to shave my head. I remember getting two responses from people. One is people like my dad, who could no longer make comments about my hair. And two, being girls, asking me why I would cut my hair.

From the years between 11-13, my dad couldn’t help but make me feel insecure about the way my hair looked. He was constantly saying. “Comb your hair.” When I would point to the product I had in my hair and explain how I had just combed it. He didn't seem to respond. Except one time I remember him trying to comb it himself. I started to obsess over the parts of my hair that would stand up and didn’t respond to the hairspray. So, I shaved my head, and that was that, or so I thought.

When I grew my hair back, I stopped using any product in my hair and just combed it the way it wanted to go. Remembering the girls who had begged me to grow it back, I now felt confident it looked good, but I still wore hats a lot. Until one day, I was at the gym, and I was wearing a hat, and when I took it off, a girl who worked there, who was very pretty, looked at me and said. “You should never wear a hat.” I didn’t know her. She had no reason to lie to me, and I could tell by how she was looking at me that she meant it, so I stopped wearing hats. The overwhelming attention convinced me that my dad was wrong about my hair, and if he was wrong about my hair what else was he wrong about?