Me Braiding Hair

I shouldn’t be braiding hair. But there I was. Giving it my best shot. 

We were in a hotel lobby. The 19-year-old sat with her back facing me. Her violent red hair in my hands. 

Hotel guests were staring at me, the middle-aged dork, unintentionally tying a young woman’s hair into knots.  

“I don’t really braid,” I explained. 

“You’re doing fine,” she said.  

Morgan cannot braid her own hair because she is paralyzed on her left side. Usually someone in her dorm braids her hair. But she’s not in a dorm. 

This weekend, she’s been trapped in a van with old people who still sing along with Brooks and Dunn.

I undid the lopsided braid. “This is a bad idea.” 

“It doesn’t have to be perfect.” 

The thing is, I used to be an okay hair-braider. This is because I had a kid sister who believed it necessary to wear her hair in a braid or else my mother would cut it off. 

My mother was obsessed with cutting hair. She owned a pair of scissors not sharpened since the Coolidge administration, which was why my sister’s hairdo looked like she had fallen into a disagreement with a wood chipper. 

My own boyhood haircuts were even worse. My mother cut my hair by placing a mixing bowl over my head and making a series of abortive scissor cuts before finally saying, “Heck with it,” then using World-War-II-era clippers to shave me bald. My fellow Boy Scouts called me Uncle Fester. 

I unfurled the braid again. “I’m not doing a very good job.” 

“You’re doing great,” she said.  

Morgan has been a good sport this weekend. We have dragged her all over Tennessee and half of Georgia. She has let me write columns about her, even though she is painfully shy. 

We’ve spent most of our time in the van where she has been forced to participate in uninteresting old-person conversation, subjected to thousands of bathroom breaks on the interstate. “Oh, we’re pulling over again?” she often says with a note of surprise in her youthful voice. 

But we have loved having Morgan with us. I love her optimism. I love her perpetual cheer. Doctors said she would never walk again. Morgan respectfully disagreed and walked anyway.  

When I finished the sorry braid, she felt the lumpy mass of snarled hair in her had. 

She just smiled, then rose from her chair to give the middle-aged dork the biggest hug, squeezing him tightly with her good arm. 

“It’s not perfect,” I explained. 

“Maybe not to you,” she said.

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Originally published on Sean’s website. Republished here with permission.

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