In Carroll County there is a woman named Wendy who converted one of her basement rooms into a barbershop. She lives in rural Maryland, where the highways have two lanes and cows still graze in the field. The driveway by Wendy's house faces an acre of cornfield. Wendy is in her fifties, has a long, slightly poofy hair style popular in the eighties, dresses very simply in big shorts, t-shirts and sandals, and speaks with that lazy Maryland accent that took the worst of Eastern shore mariners and southern sharecropers and melded them into verbal sludge.

My mother started going to Wendy with a woman she met at work. The woman's name is Tanis, which rhymes with heinous, appropriately enough. Tanis has that ugly Maryland woman's bus-driver mullet, gray hair, and a lot of face. She and my mother got along reasonably well, perhaps because Tanis didn't talk about the need to castrate Clinton quite as loudly as the other women they used to work with. They often schedule their hair-cuts with Wendy at the same time, which is the only interaction they have now after my mother quit her old job. I guess it's possible to build a friendship around just about anything when you no longer have an interest in ideas.

I went with my parents tonight to get my hair cut. The three of us took turns as Wendy cut our hair and chatted with my mother about the trip my parents are taking in July to Alaska, her own son's job search, the wedding of her son's friend, Eric's travels, and other things middle-aged people can relate to each other about. My father went first, and left a fair-sized clump of salt-and-pepper hair on the floor, which Wendy swept toward the trash. Then I went, and left almost twice as much black hair as she fixed up my fluffy, unkempt head. I always prefer the way my hair looks before I get it cut, and don't like it again for about a month. My mother followed me, and left a thin pile of nearly white hair. While she was in the chair, Wendy's brown tabby came to investigate the couch I sat on with my father, and the floor by our feet, and then he jumped onto the windowsill and looked out at the dying light. Just his tail stuck out behind the curtain, and it waved jauntily. My father told me that the last time they were there, that cat had sat in my mother's lap while she waited on the couch, and when she got into the barber's chair, he had jumped onto her lap again, under the smock.

It is very weird to watch your parents get their hair cut. They look so vulnerable with their eyes closed and their hair lank and unstyled at the sides of their heads.

While I was in the barber chair, my father asked what color Anne's hair is naturally, and when Wendy heard that in the past it had been dyed red-red, she said, "Ohhhh, I had to dye this one girl's hair red-red before. She had hair about your color, and she wanted it red just underneath for highlights. I didn't say anything, but if I had been her mother, I would have been like, 'No way!' I mean, I don't knooow . . . it's a little out theeere . . .." Later she said that the only style of hair she couldn't understand is dred locks. "They look like rats' nests! My husband asked me once how to do that one and I said, 'hey, beats me!' I just don't get that at all. I mean, why would you want to do that?"

As we drove home, we saw two women by the side of the county road walking dogs. My father was about to comment on how one of the dogs was as big as a goat, and then we realized that the woman was walking a goat.