Day 50

Teri seems very busy right now, but don't give up hope, she'll post again soon. In keeping with my post about one of my days a week, here's day 50.

Today I get my first Peruvian haircut. A woman named Marcela, a hairdresser, comes to our house and gives Teri a dye and cut job. While the dye is setting on Teri’s hair Marcella trims my hair with a pair of scissors. I sit in the kitchen in a chair with a towel over my shoulders and she wets my hair from the sink and proceeds to clip the little wings I’ve grown over both my ears and at the neck. She finishes in probably 10 minutes. The only difference I see between her and my barber’s trim at home is that after he is done with the scissors he uses an electric clipper to shave the hair off my ears and lower neck. Marcela has no electric clipper.

Teri found Marcela, or rather Marcela found Teri, when she showed up at the colegio to dress the hair of the woman teachers a day before the literary festival last weekend. She dressed the hair of 15 or 20 woman and those few who didn’t use her used someone else. Coiffed hair, makeup, and perfume are found in great abundance on women in Piura at all public events—I suppose the same could be said to be true in the USA.

I guess the unique thing about Marcela is the “house call” which is kind of fun for me; when I was a boy my mother often cut my hair with me sitting in the kitchen in a chair with a towel over my shoulders. I’d get what Mom called a “butch” haircut the day after school was out in preparation for a long hot summer in Fresno, California. Peer pressure ended that as a teenager, of course, and I wouldn’t let her touch my hair ever again.

Now that I’m an old fart I often find nostalgia so comforting, it scares me. The soft clip-clip sound of the scissors in Marcela’s hand takes me back home in an instant, for a few minutes, and sixty years.