Hair today, but here tomorrow.

I slept in my dress.
It was way too cold to do the stripping thing.
Having been up half the night watching shite and knitting what appears to be a Doctor Who style scarf, I slept late and pulled the patchwork quilt around me in the morning and turned over.
"Brrr and Bollocks" I thought when the phone rang.
Little Thomasina is parked across the road with the chihuahua in his arms, his tiny paws no bigger than my little finger, balanced on the wheel.
The two of them are staring at my front door and I shuffle down the stairs with my hair standing on end.
 Looking  like a baby that has been left  too long in a cot , a ring of  fuzz  at the back,  I extricate the tiny dog through the open window.
Dad gives me the hairy eyeball.
He thinks I have been carousing and cavorting around the streets with a motley crew of unsavoury young men.
He also thinks I am about 13.
Alas, those were the days.
The truth is that I have set a precedent on Friday nights that started when I was onstage in Dublin.
That night a cage, blankets and toys were delivered.
Now, he travels light  - with just a Dentastik for the morning.
They like to watch the Late Late together and when he comes back, he reeks of after shave where he has been nestled under my Fathers chin, getting hugged and minded.
The reality is, I use the time the dog is being babysat to catch up on the mopping that he provokes.
A team of cleaners with OCD could have a field day, washing hairy blankets, mopping tiny piss marks off skirting boards and unearthing chewed bits of things he has hidden under cushions.
I wouldn't be without him.
Little Thomasina however, cannot wait to be without him as he has him worn out,
 from barking and bossing, and trying to fish a tiny shredded troll from under the back of the Super-Ser in the kitchen, his knees clicking as he stoops, balancing the glass bowl of water on the top that I have harangued him into using, before he is overcome with fumes.
Inside, I potter, make a pot of  coffee and wander around thinking,  working out how I can bi-locate to get stuff done, I am supposed to be everywhere but here.
The phone rings and it is D, parking her car outside.
I stare at the mirror in shock.
Christ -  my hair, my head, my face is unwashed, there is eyeliner on my cheeks, I slept in my dress, oh the state.
I open the door with the dog waiting to spring out of my arms.
When I met her first, D was a different animal entirely.
Nervous, vulnerable, lost and lonely, adrift in a world of emotional fuckwits and commitment phobes, traumatised from the ending of a marrige and a dysfunctional relationship, buffeted like a cork on the tide, a pinball in a machine, reacting, and reeling from crisis to crisis like a drunk on a spree.
Looking for love in all the wrong places.
Now She has Cancer.
It has wrought many changes in her.
The chemo has shed her beautiful trademark blonde locks.
There is more hair on a billiard ball.
But she is ten foot tall and bulletproof.
She is not in the door four seconds before I am wearing her wig and rubbing her soft downy head.
We talk for hours at the kitchen table, amid the detritus of cups and biscuits, herbal tablets, remedies, cd's, books, papers and mail.
She describes the treatment for me in the kind of detail I crave.
(I recently asked a friend who has just come back from New York what it was like.
When he began to explain the basics I stopped him and said - "No, no, start with the airport on the way out.")
D tells me about the bags and tubes, the colours, the gowned and masked  nurses checking and re-checking, the feelings as the toxic drugs enter her system, the actuality of the illness. The way the bed raises and lowers, the air conditioned room, the couches they lie on, the double glazed windows, the sandwiches, the hours it takes,  the terminal patients, nothing is spared.
"You are so different now" I tell her.
She agrees.
She has a Mother, ravaged by Dementia who needs her. A woman who after putting all the towels in the fridge will look at her bald daughter and ask her if her Mother is  still alive.
She has a teenage son, bullied in school for being different, who now looks after both women, and who has morphed into the kind of kid you would be proud to know, who needs her.
She is angry and fighting back and  has no time to be ill.
I read recently how somebody described their cancer as a blessing in disguise, and how they had re-evaluated and changed their entire perspective on life, its beauty, its fragility, the fleeting nature of it.
She has learned to love herself, and the moment and take nothing for granted.
"NOW, the Universe will present you with your soul mate" I shout, banging the table and making the cutlery and the dog jump, "now that you no longer need him!"
She takes the photo of  me wearing her €500 wig, and despite the head on me, and all the things I thought were important today, I realise that I was to be not everywhere, or anywhere, but HERE today.
D is going to kick Cancer's arse, and come out the other side as a different person, with short dark curly hair and an attitude to life and love that money cannot buy.
I thank the Universe that brought her to my door, and me to my senses, and to the realisation that it is not the length, colour or state of one's head that is important, but what is IN it.
Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.
Maya Angelou