“Please quiet down class so I can start the movie”, said Mrs. O.
She was always telling us to be quiet even when there wasn’t a Dr. Seuss anniversary video about to begin. It was always “shush, class” this or “shush, class” that. I always wondered why she was never quiet herself. Anyway, the real story of my day began once the lights were turned off and the video was almost a quarter of the way through.

My kindergarten class was all seated in the small, book-lined library of my elementary school. “Sour” Elementary is what all of the kids at “Stinkin” Elementary called it. We were all seated around the five big, wooden tables in the library and some of us, like me, were forced to sit backwards in quite an awkward manner in order to properly view the video. Due to the forced position I was place in, I could clearly see the back of one of my friend’s head. She had long, dark hair that she almost always wore up in a pony-tail, but today it was simply down. It created a dark, brunette waterfall effect that had me mesmerized at the moment. It was much more interesting to watch her play with her hair than it was to watch the video.

I can recall, she kept gathering it all up; slipping a thin, black hair-band around it, and then tripling the hair-band so it held her hair close to her head tightly.

“I wonder how she does that,” I said softly to myself. The girl next to be must have heard me and gave me a weird look.

“You don’t know how to put your hair into a pony-tail,” she asked in an incredulous tone?

“Yes, I do. I just meant I wonder how Dr. Seuss writes stories,” I frantically tried to explain while being thankful the lights were off to hide my blushing face.

“Sure, that‘s why you said ‘she‘,” the girl said in a way that made my whole body freeze with embarrassment. I then went back to pretending to watch the video and ignoring the rude girl, also known as watching my friend play with her hair.

She was still going through the exact same motions involved in putting her hair up. She would then let all of her hard work go to waste by slowly pulling the hair-band out and letting her long hair swing freely once more. I recall watching her do this over and over again repeatedly in complete awe of the magical way she controlled her hair into the exact style she desired. Something I could have never done alone. After about the fourth time, I was beginning to see how the girl did it.

“Dr Seuss was a great story teller and had such an incredible way with words. He could turn any tale into a game of words with stories based off of his observations of people in his life”, the movie continued to drone on despite my amazing realization.

After the lights turned on and the movie had ended, I asked my teacher for a rubber band. I then gathered up my own hair, slipped the rubber band over my hand and onto my gathered hair. Next, I twisted the rubber band two more times in efforts to make it hold tightly to my head as the other girl had done. I had completed my first solo pony-tail. Even though it was not as good as the ones I had observed the girl create with her own hair, I still felt a great sense of pride at being able to do something that at first appeared to be so difficult to accomplish in my small, green eyes.

“Can you show me how to braid my hair sometime”, I asked my dark-haired friend as we begin to walk out of the library.

“Of course, my mom taught me how to do a bunch of stuff with my hair I could show you”, she said in her naturally soft, little-girl voice.

Her kind reply shocked me. Unlike the other girl, my friend did not mock me in any way. She actually showed genuine joy in the fact that I wanted to learn something from her. Not only had I gained a sense of intense pride on this day for accomplishing something on my own for the first time, I had improved my relationship with my friend through one brief moment of observation that would change my hair’s style life forever.