Dear Mahin,
I don’t know if you remember this, but we met by accident. Jordan and I were scheduled for a haircut with a new stylist, but when we arrived at the salon we discovered she had been called away on a family emergency.The salon owner set about finding someone else who was available to cut Jordan’s hair–and there you were, waiting for the client who’d stood you up. You said Of course, come in, when the salon owner asked if you were free. And when your client finally called to say he was running late, you told him he’d have to reschedule.
I should have known right then that I’d love you forever.
It’s possible you are the most no-nonsense person I’ve ever met. And, at the same time, you’re one of the kindest and most generous people I’ve ever met. Every Christmas, you send me home from my appointment with a plate full of homemade baklava. Before you left for a trip home to Iran, you called to let me know that you wouldn’t be available for the next month and asked if I needed a haircut before you left. When you came back from Iran, you brought me a bag full of rosewater candy called gaz, and you were very patient with my inability to repeat that word correctly. (“Gas?” No, gaz. “Gauze?” Gaz. I’m pretty sure I never got it right, but you gave me the candy anyway.)
Every time Jordan or I saw you, we got a compliment before you’d even touched our hair. You look so pretty today! That color looks great on you! I always looked forward to my appointments, and that’s saying something–when you have crazy hair like mine, it’s almost impossible to find someone who knows how to deal with it. You not only dealt with it, you let me know that it could do anything I wanted it to. You showed me what a salon-quality flat iron could do on hair like mine, and when I said “I’ll never be able to do that myself when I get home,” you handed it to me and taught me how. See, you doing it, you said. And I was. And I did. For the next several years, I wore my hair straight (for the first time in my life) because you showed me how.
In fact, any time I expressed doubt or concern about something, you were the one who shrugged and said You can do that or It’s not so hard. And then you explained exactly how something might be done, and I knew it was possible. And I knew that the only thing standing in my way, a lot of the time, was me. Your no-nonsense attitude left no room for excuses, not your own or anyone else’s.
When my hair started going gray, you changed the color of my highlights to something that worked better without even telling me what you’d done. That’s how much you knew I trusted your judgement. When I told you I wanted to grow out my bangs, you showed me how to style them so they wouldn’t drive me crazy in the process. When I wanted to stop straightening my hair and go back to wearing it natural, you changed my haircut just slightly, to make the most out of my curl. You never once said I think it looks better straight or I like it better curly. You just said You hair looks so pretty!
And now you’re retiring. And I’m not sure what I’m going to do without you.
But if anyone in the world deserves to retire, Mahin, it’s definitely you. You’ve been working since you were a very young woman in Iran. You raised three children into adulthood, all of them professional people with successful careers of their own now. You worked as a nurse until you immigrated to the United States, where you discovered that being a nurse here meant something very different–rather than serving as a Physician Assistant, the way you were trained in Iran, your job in the U.S. was to watch for trouble and call a doctor. And you couldn’t bear standing by and watching people suffer when you knew how to help, so you changed careers.
To my great good fortune, you became a hair stylist. I like to make the people happy, you told me once. I come to work and talk to the people and make them feel good. And now I’m going to have to figure out how to get along without our regular feel-good sessions.
I’m going to miss your stories about life in Iran, and about adapting to life in the U.S. when you first arrived. I’m going to miss hearing you give the English language a beautiful twist. I’m going to miss you showing me how to give my hair more wolume. (Anytime Jordan and I are fussing with our hair, one of us always says “It needs more wolume.”)
But even more than I will miss seeing you, I’ll appreciate what you’ve given me. You’ve taught me how to feel good about myself. You’ve taught me that Muslims and Christians actually have more in common than I understood, before I met you. You’ve taught me a lot about patience–after your stroke, you worked more slowly than before, but you were still the same person with the same feisty spirit. I just had to allow more time for you to do your job.
Most importantly, you’ve taught me that two people who don’t appear to have much in common–two women of different ages, with different faiths, different nationalities, and very different political and social views–can still grow to be good friends.
When I saw you for the last time, you gave me two full-size bottles of product, since you were trying to get rid of your stash. I was going to give it to the other stylists, you said, but I give it you instead. I gave you a hug and told you how much I was going to miss seeing you. You said I’m the saddest. You don’t know how saddest I am. I know you’re scared: the double knee replacement you have scheduled for next month has to be scary, and the recovery process will be slow. But if anyone can bounce back and learn to enjoy life again, it’s a no-nonsense woman like you.
When I got home from our appointment last week, I texted Jordan and told her I’d seen you for the last time. “It’s so funny to me that someone like your hair stylist becomes this really important person in your life,” I wrote.
“Well, you see her for hours at a time on a regular basis,” Jordan replied, “so it kind of makes sense that she would.”
And it actually does. I’ve seen you more regularly than my parents or my siblings over the last ten years, so it should be no wonder at all that your absence from my life will leave a hole in my heart.
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