A Bowl for Goldilocks

Pasture Cut

Turns out, the difference between a silky cascade of spun-gold radiance three-years in the making, and a jagged, war-torn mop is about five minutes and a pair of children’s scissors. My daughter, Mufus, cut her own hair yesterday. Her initiative was not kind to what had been the most beautiful head of hair in the Buckeye State, a mane so luxuriant and smooth that her father actually enjoyed brushing it.

Uh Oh

In the middle of the afternoon, my wife, Kufus, was busy baking and I was working outside. A prolonged silence in the house caught my wife’s ear, and when she investigated she found Mufus, scissors in hand, sitting in a pile of her discarded locks on the floor in our living room. My son, Rufus, was hiding behind an easy chair, sheltering from the fallout. When Kufus called me in from outside, she was near to hyperventilating and I thought something was ER-scale wrong. She told me to “look at your daughter”, I turned to look, and was only a little relieved to see that somebody had been at her hair with a weed whacker, but miraculously not harmed her ears. Mufus’ new do, was do-do; figurative poop on her head. It looked like a woman’s hairstyle from 9,000 BC, where the teeth of a recently domesticated goat did the ‘dressing’. I laughed quite heartily, to be sure, but was worried for the next step. My wife went into emergency aesthetic management mode, and called her aunt who is a beautician. Arrangements were made, and within minutes of the act, Mufus was whisked away to see how much of the flax-colored silk could be salvaged. We feared a Sinead O’Connor buzz-cut, and had heard extension banks are running very low on tow. If Life Flight did hair emergencies, they would have been involved here. With Mufus en route, Rufus and I waited anxiously. We picked up swatches of hair from all over the house to kill time; this had evidently been a mobile endeavor, and I wondered if Mufus had actively evaded detection. We watched car racing and talked about how weird it would be if Daddy wasn’t the one in the house with the least hair. Finally, a picture appeared on my cell phone, one of a strange little boy grinning ear to ear, a bowl obviously recently removed from atop his head. Caption: ‘After’. The procedure had obviously been much more difficult than we’d hoped. I could hear my wife’s aunt say solemnly in a hallway somewhere, “I did everything I could for her, but I’m not a miracle worker.” When I inquired as to whether or not an actual bowl was used, I learned that Kufus’ aunt made she and Mufus swear to never reveal who perpetrated the hair cut for fear of ruining her professional reputation. Kufus claims a bowl was not involved. Haircut says otherwise.



'After'



My daughter was still lights out cute, just alarmingly different in appearance. When I showed Rufus the picture and asked if he liked Mufus’ new haircut, he got misty and slowly shook his head. It just wasn’t his sister. We sat in stunned silence until Mufus returned home. Her first words on the subject? To her brother, after he complemented her new look, she said with delight, “I look like you!” She didn’t miss her silky strands a bit; they caught everyone else’s eyes, but got in hers. They also harbored massive amounts of syrup on pancake mornings. I began to suspect that Mufus knew exactly what she was doing with those scissors.