The Array of Hair «Хорошо»

I have been cutting my mother’s hair since I was fourteen.

That makes forty-four years.

At fourteen, a person thinks she can do any task. No fear of failure was present in the fourteen-year-old girl who was asked, for the first time, to cut her mother’s hair according to whatever specifications her mother could deliver.

I am the only person who cuts her hair, and my mother is the only person whose hair I cut.

This arrangement has survived because my mother is consistently happy with the result.

There is one problem.

I do not know how to cut hair.

And that statement was actually tested.

Once, in the early years, someone saw the result of my mother’s haircut and asked me to cut a boy’s straight, thin hair.

The result was a disaster.

I was never asked by anyone again — or perhaps I refused. I am no longer sure what was the cause and what was the output of that arrangement.

The beauty of it is that I have no technique to follow.

This leaves me free to experiment, although within very strict limits, because my mother does not believe that freedom should extend too far when scissors are near her head.

Every haircut begins the same way.

I stand behind her and make a threatening little sound with the scissors.

— Как будем стричься?

I enter the role of a professional hairdresser asking such a question of every new client who enters her salon.

My mother always gives me precise instructions, destroying the theatre of my professional salon.

— Хорошо. Хорошо будем стричься.

And so we begin.

In the kitchen.

The interesting thing is that after forty-four years, the haircut comes out approximately the same.

The algorithm does not.

I change it constantly.

I begin somewhere else. I establish one section through another. I change the sequence. Something I used as a reference last time becomes the thing being transformed this time.

My mother’s hair makes this particularly interesting because it is curly.

It is a messy array.

The elements refuse to stay where they are placed.

For forty-four years I have been changing the operations while preserving something recognizable in the result.

Today I cut my mother’s hair again.

Halfway through, I noticed that I had changed the algorithm once more.

The haircut came out хорошо.

My mother was pleased.

I was pleased.

Only now, after all these years of thinking about arrays and transformations, did I notice what I have apparently been doing since I was fourteen.

I switch the places of notations while transforming an array of hair.

Fortunately, the array has never asked to see my qualifications.

It has the ever-changing liveness of curls.

Beware, little curls! I am coming again in four months.