Zoom is starting to remind me of going to get my hair cut. How you sit there for an hour or more, looking at yourself in the mirror, thinking about your stupid hair.
In times of trouble, my hair usually serves me well. When I have travelled roughly, staying in small, rickety hotels with only small, rickety fans to force out the heat, or driving around in the backs of jeeps for hours feeling thirsty and wondering when the day will end, my hair literally rises to the occasion. My fellow travellers comment on it. It gets better with dust and dirt and time and no shampoo. I can sculpt it and twist it. It gets just the right size of big. My hair stays exactly where I put it. For once, I have the best hair in the group, which never, ever happens to me in any other circumstances.
Pandemic hair is clean hair, but not good hair. It’s ordinary hair, only worse. And there it is on your Big Zoom Head, and there you are taking meetings right on your bed.
My beautiful, best-ever office, though it’s my smallest-ever office, is in our kitchen which works out perfectly when there isn’t a pandemic. I can wheel around the kitchen in my office chair. I can sit in front of the open fridge, and then roll right on over to the coffee pot. But now that the kitchen is open for food business 24/7, things have changed. Bumping into other workers is a real concern, for the first time ever. That’s why I’m taking meetings on my bed, pillows plumped up behind me, leaning against our headboard. Weird.
The other day I shared a zoom call with my new writer friend, Maggie Wallem Rowe, who wrote a wonderful book called This Life We Share: 52 reflections on journeying well with God and others. Maggie and I release books on the exact same day, coming up on May 5. She’s a woman’s woman, and you know what I mean by that. She’s someone I could talk to about all kinds of stuff, and I know she would listen. In fact, just this morning I found one line in her book that I think sums up the whole thing: “If this is where you’re at right now, I understand.”
So, within two minutes of our zoom call, which we recorded for sharing later, we were helping each other with lighting and hair. I murmured about how great her lipstick shade was, perfect with what I have to say is really great hair. She told me she liked mine too, and that the light in my kitchen was just right. This is the kind of zoom buddy we all need right now.