“I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair.” I presume that means blond. And I visualize it as long.

Shirley had long hair. Light brown. She said, having learned it from her Mother, “A woman’s hair is her crowning glory.” She was glorious. She brushed it every night, religiously, 200 strokes.

I loved her hair. I would run my fingers through it. I would bury my face in it. It smelled deliciously like her.

The famous story, before we were married and I was pursuing her, we had played tennis on a hot day at the courts on the UCR campus. We took a break to drink from the drinking fountain just beyond the fence. She bent to drink, I held her hair back to keep it dry, ardently nuzzled it and said soulfully, “I could bury myself in your hair forever!”

She went home that weekend and cried to her Mother, “He hates me! He thinks my hair is to bury dead people in!”

Her Mother said, “You silly girl! He’s crazy about you!”

Mother was right and won the argument.

Long hair has a long history.

We all know Rapunzel, whose hair was so long it reached the ground from her high window in the castle, and strong enough for a suitor to climb for a kiss. Just the way, in another old tale, Jack climbed the beanstalk [the parallel is in the climbing].

Fewer of us know of Bess, the Landlord’s Daughter, who loosed her hair o’er the casement as it fell over the face of the Highwayman below rising in his stirrups. I memorized the poem in High School, recited it at Speech Tournaments, and won trophies.

When Shirley entered our suburban High School because her parents moved closer from L.A., she brought her hair with her, and I thought of her as I recited the poem. I was incurably romantic.

She astounded me and my friends when, in a dance recital in the High School auditorium, in a tight-fitting costume, she danced toward the footlights. She had let her hair down. My friends cheered, and my heart skipped a beat.

My love of opera, a passion not shared by and unknown to my generation, caused my roving mind to release itself to speculation.

There are operas where the heroine in her boudoir brushes her long hair.

I imagined a soprano (Shirley was a soprano) with hair so long it trailed down below her waist. To make sure the audience saw her crowning glory, as she faced the auditorium, she turned in profile to reveal her free fall. In Yosemite they call it Bridal Veil Fall.

I imagined the hair, like a bridal veil, trailing longer as it grew, dragging across the stage, out the door and down the street, attracting crowds who filled the theater to see the source, and she had to hire a series of porters to carry her tresses through the town.

In the theater, audiences were distracted from her voice. Victor Borge, playing opera and singing bass, lower and lower, said, “How low can a man get?” The soprano’s audience, when she held a long note, thought of her long hair and said, “How long can it get?”

And why am I writing about this today?

Because I miss Shirley. I want to bury myself in her hair forever.