Another Story: “The Banker”

I got my haircut! Hooray! Which has sparked my mindset for my newest post.

I’ve been getting my haircut by the same woman since I was seven years old. She’s amazing, and has always been super great to me. It’s even more awesome that her salon just happens to be less than two miles from my office, which is very convenient. Her name is Jennifer Bennett. I highly recommend her, if you’re in Atlanta.

I recently read the two stories about my little brother over my phone to my mom. Since then, she has been remembering more and more funny things from when Nick and I were younger, and how she wants me to write about them. Namely, the airplane story, the mountain bottle story, and this one….

Unlike my father, the early riser, my mother has devoted a majority of her life to sleeping in. I recall several stories from my Pop that involve waking my mom up with bucket full of water. I really don’t think I can fully explain exactly how much my mom loves to sleep, but hopefully this gives you an adequate idea.

My independence started when I was little.

In order to do anything before the hours of 9:30am, at the earliest, it was going to have to be up to me. Learning simple functions such as how to turn the T.V. on was definitely important. For a five year old, this was rather difficult because Dad has always been about the “newest and coolest” technologies. I’m fairly certain we had four remotes that all worked independently of each other, but were absolutely necessary in the functioning of the television. I figured out how to use all of them. Other functions included how to feed myself, get dressed if I so desired, go to the bathroom- essentially, the bare necessities of how to survive from the ages of 4 to 8.

One particular morning, I got up as I always did at 7:15am on the dot, and headed towards the living room for my morning round of cereal and Inspector Gadget. I still remember that cartoons in the morning ran as such: Inspector Gadget at 7:30, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles back to back at 8:00 and 8:30am, and then a mash-up of Animaniacs or Pinky and the Brain at 9am.

For the record, I was a huge Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan. I had the bed sheets, pillows, water bottles – you name it. Anyway –

That morning I ventured out to the grey sofa, hopped up in my spot and turned on the T.V. Much to my surprise, I had already seen the episode of Inspector Gadget on Nickelodeon and, as a child with an exceptionally small attention span, I was immediately bored. I was never a child who could mindlessly watch cartoons and movies over and over and over – I demanded new entertainment each time. Honestly, not much has change since then. To this day, there are very few movies which I can watch over and over again. Dirty Dancing and Footloose are still the front runners.

I needed to find a new source of entertainment.

I’m fairly certain every little girl has done something to this extent. I really don’t recall why I decided to play this game, but I did. I decided to play “Banker.” I wandered into the kitchen, pulling a chair from the dinning room table, and clambered my way on top of it to open what my mom has always called “the junk drawer.” This drawer is a collection of mess – pens, pencils, markers, random crap that mom found that didn’t have a home but needed one, and most importantly, scissors.

I took the scissors from the junk drawer and jumped down from the chair. Needless to say, I didn’t get the memo about running with scissors, much less jumping off a chair with them. I wandered over to the trash can and decided that this would be the teller.

What would be the money?

My hair.

Seeing as I am right handed, I took hold of the left side of my head and long, long blond hair. I cut off the very end at first – not much, just a snip, and threw it into the trash can.

“That’ll be one dollar” (seriously, I remember saying this) as I tossed the blond hairs amusingly into the can.

It was then that I decided that whatever unknown object I was buying, or banking, or who knows what, required more money. I remember the sound of my hair as it sliced beneath the blades of the red handled scissors. I think the sound was so interesting that it was probably a contributing factor in my continuing to snip away. I still love that sound.

I cut a much larger portion of my hair, and tossed into the trash can deciding that the amount I had cut was worth five whole dollars.This patterned continued for quite some time as I had a head full of hair and all the time in the world.

I nearly scalped myself.

My mom, waking earlier than normal that morning, rounded the hallway into the kitchen still half asleep to find me standing there with the left side of my  head almost bald. Her blond hair little girl now looked like a trauma patient.

I really don’t remember the sequence of events from that point forward. What I do remember is this:

1. My mom was irate. She woke up rather quickly after it registered what had happened.

2. She hid the scissors for weeks after this.

3. She called my Dad.

Number three, I remember quite well. I wasn’t really upset that she was yelling at me, in fact I distinctly remember shrugging it off, but then she said “I’m calling your father.”

Immediate panic.

I ran into the living room and jumped onto the couch, head first, and tried to dig myself into the seat cushions as I heard my mom on the phone explaining what I had done to my Dad on on the other line. I’ve mentioned this before, but an angry Padre in my family is equivalent to a four year grounding sentence. And more terrifying.

My mom got off the phone and walked into the living room where I was and said, “I’ve called your father. He’s on his way home, Samantha! He’s so mad at you!”

I walked up to her, with my arms crossed and lip pursed out, and can still remember the flood of panic as I knew Dad was driving home to yell at me.

And he did. He drove 45 minutes just to yell at me, turn around, and drive 45 minutes back to work.

From the morning I cut my hair and was mad my mom called my dad

…Thankfully Jen moved into our neighborhood when I was about seven or eight. I think it took that long before it looked even slightly normal again.