I have a new favorite salon and it’s in the drab and under-appreciated city of Worcester, Massachusetts. I’ve never been a spa or salon girl—in fact, if I could cut and color my own hair, as nicely as I cut the lawn and color the garden with flowers, I would do it.

Drab hip is what’s cool about Worcester—there’s a fragmented grunginess about the city that leaves itself alone. Not much legacy or nouveau riche, dreadfully fine* money polishes its urban edges. Go in search of somewhere to hang out, and you’ll feel yourself pulled into a pause. Disoriented, you could be right, you could be wrong about where you’re standing. Something creeps underneath the radar, maybe. There are no crowds to follow and no painted lines to a tourist kiosk. No costumed, smiling docents. The art museum is superb. The array of educational institutions is world class. There are great places to eat and drink. And there are businesses, like Barney’s Bike Shop, with an excellent link on their website about where to hit the road, or the trail, with a bike.

*Dreadfully Fine: I learned this from my son and his friends in college—it means you are depressed due to the fact that everything about your life is so dreadfully fine.

The beauty salon I found in Worcester is Tu Moda Spa and Salon on Pleasant Street. Their decor is American slash European-Hill-Town slash Almost-Chic, and the music piped in, at least during my last several visits, has been tres hip. (Important.)

The European thing lured me to this salon when I went looking for a place to take my daughter for her birthday. She is a spa girl. She is also a lucky charm and I ended up finding a hairstylist at Tu Moda I like a lot. My new hairstylist is tres tres tres tres tres hip. Five-star hip.

First of all, she loves Acadia National Park. So do I. She loves it through and through. She loves how she can go there with a group of friends, and there’s something for everyone. She loves how it’s hidden, but not really, in New England.

She loves to cook. Me too.

She loves to bake, but thinks it’s more challenging than cooking. Same.

She traveled to visit family, as a child, into the summertime countrysides near Amsterdam. The beauty formed within her while spending time with her family, (for she talks of it with joy), has not faded.

Today, when I sat in my hairstylist’s chair, I told her about the recipes I cut out of the Boston Globe and the New York Times. We gushed on and on about radishes fresh from the farm in summertime. There was a recipe in the paper for Butter-Stewed Radishes. I told her I think everyone should get a hard-copy of the newspaper, at least on the days featuring Food. You can tear out the recipes, and keep them. After reading through the newspaper food sections, first thing in the morning, right off the bat you’re ready to saddle up the horse and ride to a farmer’s market.

My hairstylist loves music festivals and following favorite bands.

She loves her dog. I don’t know her dog, but if I did, I am sure I would love her dog, too.

She likes to wander around Worcester and find great bakeries, great places to drink coffee, great bars to share beers with friends.

She tells me about unknown bakeries and funky shops and where to eat the best brunch.

She loves gardens and is helping her friend make a garden at her friend’s new house in Providence. I told her about the Beacon Hill Garden Tour. I said she and her friend should go on the tour together to find ideas for small, delicious, dreamy, urban gardens. She said spending money to go to Boston for a day with a friend to look at gardens, would be worth every penny.

She was an artist in high school, applied to art schools, was accepted, but couldn’t afford to attend any of them. So, she became a hairstylist, because it was something else she thought she would enjoy doing.

She is a cheerful artist who is a hairstylist—perhaps it’s a little bit like being a happy poet who is a therapist. But way more fun.

She lives with, and takes care of, her father. He had a stroke a few years ago.

She told me her father had always admired Bob Dylan, so she took him to a concert several years ago. Elvis Costello was the opening act. Dylan was horrible, she said, and she felt awful for her father. I told her we went to the same show and thought, thank goodness for Elvis Costello, because Dylan was lost in a caricature of his many selves, all of them muddied into one unappealing performance. We both said it can’t be easy to be an artist who is expected to perform, and live up to, great expectations.

I especially like when my hairstylist tells me gentle stories about her father. He used to enjoy cooking. So, she will ask him what he might want for dinners, they will talk about recipes, and then she will assemble the ingredients and orchestrate the process–making sure to allow him to cook as much as he can.

I tell her how much my husband loves to cook and how he will artfully arrange the food just so, taking his time to arrange perfect sprays of fresh herbs, perfect brush strokes of secret sauces, and perfect garnishes of fruit, flowers, or veggies. She says her father wants to do all of that, too. She said he used to work in the garden so she recently bought him small, terrarium gardens to tend, after she found them at an eclectic and strange shop in Worcester called Seed to Stem.

She told me I would probably like Seed to Stem.

I told her my husband’s father loved to cook, too, but he suffered a massive stroke almost three years ago and didn’t survive. He liked to garden, too, and used to grow pleasing varieties of tomatoes for all of his children, from seed, in a unique set-up of lights and growing trays down in his basement. I looked forward to his special deliveries every spring, and his concentrated instructions for transferring the plants into the Earth. After I situated the tomato plants into the garden, my father-in-law never ceased to check in on how they were doing. I made sure to give him frequent updates on the details of our flavorful excursions through the ripe skins of those precious tomatoes.

*****

Today, my appointment was early, so my hairstylist asked if I had any plans for the rest of the day. I said that after reading all the foodie pages in the newspaper, I wanted to design a picnic because my husband and I were going to Vermont to ski and I wanted to pack something new for our lunch.

So far this season, I told her, I’d made homemade chicken salad sandwiches and outrageous homemade meatloaf sandwiches for our ski trip lunch picnics. The meatloaf was an experiment using leftover beef, veal, and pork after my husband made bolognese.

I said I planned to stop at BirchTree Bread, (drab hip warehouse space), over in the Blackstone Canal District to have a cup of soup and check out the breads. The chef there is no hobbyist. He’s focused on food. The morning’s newspaper had included some press about his hideout in Worcester.

Then I hoped to stop at Trader Joe’s.

But now, I said to my hairstylist, I would add her recommended detour to the funky shop—Seed to Stem.

*****

When I got to BirchTree Bread, I tried a killer cup of celery root soup. Great music played on the sound system. (Important.) I slurped the soup surrounded by gray-toned scales of urban decay, blending old warehouse and mill buildings into a sturdy mid-day wash of melting snow, mud, and wet fog. The restaurant space is vast. Computers glowed. One little boy, wearing a bright yellow slicker, laughed. A man conducted business on his phone. People socialized. I was alone, anonymous, content. The pace of my breath slowed to imaginative thoughts. Efforts to preserve history loitered on city streets so deserted, I could make a U-turn on them, in a tandem-tractor trailer, in one fell swooping turn.

God bless BirchTree Bread for bringing some faith to the city. I bought a fresh loaf of their rosemary ciabatta and commenced hunting for the rest of a designer picnic lunch.

Next, I stopped at Seed to Stem. Good music playing! My hairstylist didn’t divulge details about the shop, so when I arrived, surprises were well appreciated. I took some pictures of things that were not for sale.

I found something that was for sale, about another city I like a lot:

At Trader Joe’s, I bought flowers. (Best flowers, best prices, best displays.)

I bought Trader Joe’s thick slices of cooked and salted turkey.

I bought Italian dry salami and pepper jack cheese.

Ideas for sandwich designs began rising and falling in my mind.

For the picnic side dish, I selected a bag of sweet-potato snack chips.

And for dessert, I bought Trader Joe’s dark-chocolate peanut butter cups.

I drove home, unloaded the groceries, and rummaged through the fridge for sandwich start-ups and add-ons.

There was a half can of tomato paste calling out to be rescued.

*****

Final design:

GYPSY SKI PICNIC ZINGWICH

Trader Joe’s cooked, sliced turkey.

Italian dry salami.

Pepper jack cheese.

Lettuce. Tomato.

Fresh cilantro.

Gypsy Zing Sauce.

BirchTree rosemary ciabatta bread.

(Sweet bread and butter pickles—optional.)

Gypsy Zing Sauce: 1/4 c. mayonnaise—3 or so tablespoons of tomato paste—a teaspoon and a dash more of Worcestershire sauce (Worcester!)—half a lemon squeezed out (probably about a tablespoon)—sea salt—coarse ground pepper.

The sandwich contains multitudinous flavors of drab hip, gypsy grit—with zing.

Bon appétit, picnic lovers!