At Woody Guthrie's home site in Okemah, Oklahoma

PLEASE FIX THIS AWFUL HAIRCUT

It was once a faux hawk, at least as much of a hawk as is possible with my rapidly vanishing hair.  You know, a little elevation on top to counterbalance my undistinguished chin. 

You see, last week my hairdresser up and quit.  So I panicked, stopping by one of those walk-ins welcome places in the mall.  There was nobody there except for Maria.  When I asked her to trim my faux hawk she replied, “Que?” 

As she was configuring her clippers, she mentioned that she was from Juarez.  So, I told her I grew up in El Paso, just across the border from Juarez.  And that after all these years I still think about my first love, a girl named Tatiana.  She had raven hair, eyes the color of smoky quartz, and she smelled like new raindrops on the parched desert.  She rode the bus across the border every day to attend my school while her mother cleaned houses for rich people.  I told Maria I’d give anything to know if Tatiana ever made it out of the Juarez slums. 

As I said this Maria became silent, and a tear ran down her cheek.  She told me she was lucky to be alive after leaving Juarez twenty years ago.  She came across to find the love of her life, who’d vanished across the border to find work.  So, she hired a Coyote to smuggle her across in a semi-truck trailer.  She said they were packed in like cattle in the heat of summer.  And there was trouble, causing the smuggler to ditch the trailer along a remote highway.  But thankfully not before opening the door.    

She said she dreams every night about how her life would have turned out if she had found the only man she ever loved.  Odds are the driver never opened the door for him. 

Perhaps conversations with the barber should be kept to a minimum, or at least not of topics such as life, death and love.  Because just about then I realized why she said “que” when I asked her to trim my faux hawk.  She’d removed the hawk, leaving me with little more than what the country folks used to call a burr.  My once proud and mighty hawk was now a humble sparrow.