Lucky

I've been trying to get my hair cut for the past two weeks, but Ali, my hair cutter, always seems to have a 3 hour wait in the chair, no matter what time I tell him I want to arrive. So after an impromptu dinner with Francoise on this blustery and cold day, where the tail end of the nor'easter whipped through the city, I knew I'd be able to finally get in there.

I didn't realize that the shop closed at 8pm, and I showed up at a quarter to eight. Ali was doing the finishing touches on a man's buzz cut, and said that he'd take me anyway, despite the hour. The other barbers were cleaning their stations, covering their scissors and combs, and they began to filter out one by one. Ali twisted my hair up into coils to separate out the layers of hair to trim them neatly. "I've always told you," he said, "you're lucky. I had another woman come in here and ask if I could take her, but I said no. When you come in, I said, oh, it's you. I'll take you. See? Lucky." I remembered the time that Ali looked at my hands a few years back and said that I was lucky. "Ali," I said, "is it because of this?" I said, pointing to a birthmark in the center of my right hand, which a Korean woman once told me was very lucky.

"No!" he barked, and turned my palms over, sprayed them with water from the water bottle he usually uses on scalps and looked at the lines. "This is why you are lucky," he declared as he drew his finger across a deep line on my right hand. This line has always troubled me, as it's a combination of a head and heart line that is perfectly straight across my palm. Most people have three lines on their palms, I only have two. I have always thought that this means something quite the opposite of lucky. But Ali had a different story: "This means you have the energy, and you are covered. This means that you have the force, you always have the force. You have...the puissance."

Ali has said this to me before--always using the word puissance. "In my country," he explained, "in Morocco, there are the people like you, the lucky ones. The ones who could find treasure and make the gold rise up from the ground. They would cut themselves across the palm, right where your line is, and make the blood flow to the ground. That's how they could find it. You have this. You have the force. You are covered."

Now you have to understand, that not everything that Ali says makes sense. I usually only understand every third word, and often don't understand when he's asking something simple like which side of my head I like to part my hair. But he was very insistent. "Lucky," he kept saying.

I stopped talking to Ali and took time to think about what he was saying. A few minutes later, I realized that there was no one else in the cavernous shop, and we both became aware of the silence. Ali went over to the radio and flipped it on. "Just the Way You Are" by Bruno Mars began to play. As soon as the song finished he shut the radio to blow dry my hair. He handed me his iPod Touch and dialed up videos on Youtube of different instances of snowstorms in Morocco, and the fun that snowboarders had visiting the snow in North Africa. It took him a full hour to wash, cut and dry my hair.

When he finished he looked at me and said, "Yes. Lucky and beautiful."

Needless to say, I gave him an excellent tip.