Of All the Hair Salons in the World, I Walk Into Hers

I am very unfussy about my hair. I wash it. I don't own a blow dryer. I don't even own a hair brush. A comb seems to do the trick. I don't color it. I don't style it. I might be delusional, but mostly, I think it looks fine.

I used to set it on giant pink plastic rollers when I was in high school so it would be smooth and straight-ish. By the end of my freshman year of college, I began to let it do its own weird and wavy thing. Oh, and after I went gray in my early 40s, I had it colored for years. A base color, highlights, and eventually an intensely detailed weave so I was more blond than gray. When The Someone dumped me for a woman 20 years younger, I gave it up.

Nowadays, I prefer to think of it as silver rather than gray, but lately something's been going haywire (that IS the perfect word) with the texture. While I do confess to cultivating my beach crone look,  the witchy texture was too much, so yesterday I went to a salon on the spur of the moment and got worked in for a gloss job. I knew there was such a thing as lip gloss, of course, but now my hair has a coating of gloss, too. I do think it's shinier and less witchy.

BUT, here's the amazing thing--even more amazing than shiny hair. The stylist is somewhere around my age (or something close--or a little younger, probably) and her fiancé died rather suddenly a year and a half ago. I'm not even sure how this came up, but you know, when you go to a salon, you just end up making conversation. There were many similarlities in our lives and in our losses. We connected in so many ways. So, I have shiny hair, and my heart feels a little shinier too.

She says that just recently she feels herself coming out of the fog. Like she's been on a raft in the middle of the ocean, lost. And now she's spotted land. She's not there yet, she says, but she's paddling toward it. I can't quite imagine it. But because she told me about it,  I believe it's possible.

I went to another L.A. Literary Event last night. The daughter C. and I soaked up the neon atmosphere of Chinatown before we entered into the crimson cave that is The Mountain Bar. Hipster dive bar, I've heard it called. C. says all hipster bars are dive bars. But not all dive bars are hipster bars. In her line of work, there are always true dive bars in the neighborhood. Tall ship sailors hang out in ports, and ports are not the gentrified end of town. But in the sea of literary dive-y-ness that washed up in the Mountain Bar last night, there was literary gentry, and it was cool to think, hey, yeah, I'm in the the same lit mag those folks are in. It makes the beer taste better, anyway.

Sam Dunn was one of the readers last night. She said something about "the psychosis of place" as she prefaced her reading, and the phrase has been bumping around in my brain. Place effects me tremendously. In a new place I sometimes feel as if my old self could be taken over by a new me. As if something akin to the French concept of terroir might grow a new person.

Place is context. I couldn't help noticing that in the hundred or so people crammed into the reading, that I was the lone silver-haired woman. There were silver-haired men. They stood at the bar and ordered Cosmos for their wives or girlfriends and carried them back to women who were not gray. Ah, well--this is aging in the context of The City of Angels--even in a bar in Chinatown.