Three thoughts about hair.

1. Gus, age two, had his first haircut a few weeks ago. He had wild rock and roll hair, which looked great, but in the summer heat the combination of grub and uncut hair made him look like a little boy nobody was looking out for. I'd thought about taking him to some Kids' Kutz place, but instead we brought him to the gorgeous old barber shop in Harvard Square, where (so I've heard) presidents JFK and OHB got their hair cut, too. The guy put a padded board across the arms of the chair, and though Gus was scared for ten seconds he then decided to be very brave. And so he was. We asked to keep it long, and the result is an early 60s British invasion kind of 'do. My friend Lib says he looks like the young Mick Jagger.

We didn't save any of it. Good idea? Bad?

2. Matilda, age .5, has what is variously been called a Mohawk, Fauxhawk, and Beckham. Sometimes she looks like Tin Tin and sometimes a kewpie doll. I realized with a start the other day that she looked a lot like the most beloved doll of my childhood, Amy Elizabeth. (Yes, I seemed to have named a doll at least partly for myself.) Amy Elizabeth was a Madame Alexander babydoll, given to me by my grandmother. I carried her (the doll, not my my grandmother) around by her hair for so long that eventually all she had left was a grubby tuft sticking up in the center of her head. Everything else was gone. My grandmother was so put off by this that she actually bought Amy Elizabeth a tiny wig, which (though dark brown) was (as I remember) styled very much like my grandmother's.

3. My first child's hair was dark, like mine. I remember being--puzzled? disturbed?--by the fact that I would never know what color his eyes would have been, though surely they would have been blue at first. But he had dark hair, I knew that. Matilda's hair was also dark when she was born, but then it all fell out and now, like Gus, she's on the brunette side of blonde. I think she was three months old before I realized that one of the only things I thought I knew about that first child was something that might not have continued to be true, had he lived.