The Hair Stylist

My oldest sister is five years older than I am. Like Bossy, she suffers from the oldest-child-syndrome. Now I don’t want to go into the particulars of oldest-child-syndrome because you either are one or you have one. Let’s just say that as a younger child, it’s advisable to keep the older sibling happy.

My sister graduated from high school in 1978. She was an incredibly smart, valedictorian-type. In 1978 I was a dumpy little eight grader (ok, actually I was kind of cute). One day when I was feeling particularly defiant I went to a friend’s house and had her sister cut my bangs in the Farrah Fawcett style. My mom had a fit! I’ve told you before about her long beautiful hair. She didn’t wear bangs and she didn’t want any of us to have bangs either. But there wasn’t much she could do about it at that point so after a couple of weeks she started talking to me again…

My mother's beautiful silver hair and a pose I am sure I frequently caused.

Anyway, as any good rebel will tell you, it’s important to coerce others to follow your lead. It wasn’t long before my older sister decided she wanted her bangs cut too. My mom had been in the habit of pulling my sister’s long hair into a ponytail every night and then wrapping small strands of it into scratchy black rollers. When my sis decided she wanted to cut her bangs like her naughty little sister my mom didn’t know how to make her bangs look good with curlers. So I was quickly recruited to curl her bangs with the curling iron each and every morning.

Me, senior year

This resulted in a couple of things…ok three things and two of them were large burns in my carpet. (My mom wasn’t very happy about that.) The third thing was that my sister looked absolutely fabulous every morning when she headed off to school. Except for the morning that she didn’t. For some reason, I couldn’t get her hair to go quite right. She was getting nervous and the bus was coming for the second time. (We had two opportunities to get on the bus because the bus driver lived across the road from us. So we could get on at the beginning of the route or somewhere in the middle when he came through again). She ended up yelling at me and stomping out the door.

I felt so bad…I was getting up half an hour earlier each and every morning to be her personal hair stylist (for free I might add) and I was being abused because her hair happened to have one stubborn morning! I spent the rest of the school day having my own pity party, vowing that when morning came I wouldn’t get out of bed until it was time to get myself ready. When I got home I tossed my books on the couch and stomped my way up the stairs to the bedroom. Maybe a nap would help my rotten mood. That’s when I saw them. Three beautiful fresh flowers wrapped in florist’s tissue paper and arranged on my pillow with a note of apology and appreciation from my older sister. Yeah…the next morning I was up again, bright and early…

Big Sis and me at my wedding
(but she did her own hair).