When I was six, I had my very first best friend. Myrth was quiet and funny, with fair skin and brown eyes. I was fascinated by her hair, which she always wore in ringlets. Every day I watched the dance of those light brown spirals that dangled from the top of her head down past her narrow shoulders. They bobbed when she moved around our first grade classroom, and when she ran across the playground they bounced like ping pong balls on an episode of Captain Kangaroo. I longed to cup one into the palm of my hand and feel it's soft curve, or gently tug the bottom of one and watch it boing back into place. Out of respect for Myrth, I did neither.
I eventually talked Mom into curling my hair into ringlets. With the bristly pink curlers snapped into my clean, damp hair, I went to bed full of excitement and anticipation. Would my friends recognize me with my new hairdo? I barely slept that night, imagining how it would feel with those pretty sausages wiggling every time I moved my head. How fun it would be to share hairstyles with Myrth. The next morning Mom brushed and fiddled and turned the locks around her fingers, but my hair wouldn't cooperate. "Oh well, I guess your hair is too straight," she said, eventually brushing my hair into a ponytail.
After that, my longing for ringlets faded, most likely because it wasn't Myrth's ringlets I was enamored with, it was Myrth. At age six, she was my very first friend and I was learning what it felt like to have someone special in my life who was separate from, and unknown to my family. She wasn't the daughter of one of my mom's friends and she wasn't a cousin, or a neighbor. She was someone I had met and made friends with all on my own. I loved that there was another little girl who was just like me but with different hair and different clothes, from another neighborhood, and another family. I looked forward to school every day where we would giggle and play together at recess. I was special to her and she was special to me. Even with boring hair, life was good.
