The world's best hairdresser: Miriam, a 40-something Colombian immigrant, now a U.S. citizen, who learned how to cut hair by practicing every weekend on her family members back home--8 siblings and God knows how many cousins. We found each other by accident my 1L year of law school. After the first haircut in October, I went to no one else. Miriam was a true craftswoman. It took her 50% longer to cut my hair than other stylists, but when she finished it was perfect. It's not easy to make my hair look handsome, but she did it. Miriam cut my hair each month of that year, until one day in late May I stopped in the salon on Broadway and she was gone. Nobody knew where she went. She'd talked in the past about attending secretarial school at Gateway Community College, so I figured she'd made good on her plan.
My 2L year, I got by on free haircuts from a friend. The price decline was great, but the quality also took a correlative dip. Not that this mattered much. As my mother and sisters can attest, I've never paid a great deal of heed to hair care. My college roommate once described me as "a cross between Michael Jackson and a broccoli stalk." A hit; a palpable hit. It stung, but only because it was a fair point, at least so far as my head was concerned: since puberty my hair has usually been a steel wool mess.
All good things must come to an end, including my free-clipping friend, who moved away from New Haven last summer. When I returned for my 3L year I knew I'd have to start fresh with the worst of both worlds--so-so haircuts that I actually had to pay for.
A few weeks into September and a few days out from official Chia-Pet sponsorship, I had a couple hours to spare for errands. So I took a walk down Wall Street looking for a barber. I stepped into the first one I saw and who should I behold but Miriam. She recognized me immediately. "Same haircut?" she asked me when I sat down. Same haircut, I said.
At one point in our conversation that followed, I made a weak joke about how the soft, yellow-blond hair of my childhood had transformed into this bland and wiry tangle. What Miriam said next caught me by surprise. "But it is beautiful," she said, pinching a tuft between her fingers. "It is ash."
Ash. I'd never heard someone call my hair ash before. "It is what the people, they ask for their highlights," said Miriam. And just like that, for the first time in my life, I saw the beauty in my own hair. It is ash, a subtle, complex beauty; a coat of many colors really, but with all distinctions honed within the tight spectrum of ice-white to bronze. What a gift, to see one's own hair with affection for the first time.
The end of the story is that Miriam convinced me, in what must be a minor miracle, to order a $25 bottle of shampoo. This is equal to the total amount of money I have spent on shampoo in the past five years combined. Beauty, though.
