100 Strokes 

As I slept one night, I awoke with a jolt. Was I dreaming? I jumped from my bed to see if the image in my mind was memory or just imagination. Was there really an old manila envelope up in my attic filled with clippings? Even at that late hour, I had to investigate. In fact it wasn't my imagination, but reality. The clippings were there but they were not clippings of articles from newspapers, or images from a magazine, but of hair, beautiful locks of hair preserved in sandwich bags each labeled with handwritten names of my brothers, my sister, myself, my father and my mother.  Since discovering this package in my attic, I have been fascinated with the subject of hair. Sometimes it is my obsession with my own hair graying as I grow older, sometimes it is with my young daughter's smooth, glowing long hair and sometimes it is with the contents of this envelope filled with the remnants of a long ago childhood and the physical embodiment of life long passed.