Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

Posted on May 9, 2013 under Storytelling with 4 comments

I recently looked at an old family photo album and saw a picture of this cute little guy with blond curly hair.  He was on his way to the barbershop for his very first haircut.  The before and after pictures provide stark evidence of the power of clippers. The beanshave haircut was a staple for most kids back then. This clean cut look persisted well into the teenage years. There is a family picture taken that should have as its title “Revenge of the Nerds”.

And then the’60’s arrived and the youth of that generation were quick to protest about almost everything. It began with the mop top of the Beatles but by the late ‘60’s most guys and gals had decided to take a hiatus from barbershops and salons. They literally and figuratively let their hair down.  I was one of those who wandered aimlessly around the university campus with an afro that defied both chemistry and physics. … and logic.  Interestingly, I never took a course in any of these subjects.

My parents were perplexed with the lot of us at that time but to their eternal credit, they rolled with the punches.  One incident stands out.  After a night at a local watering hole, I awoke to a splitting headache, which wasn’t a total surprise.  Instinctively I put my hands to my head only to discover a swizzle stick.  You know the kind, with the pointy arrow on one end.  I extricated the offending object from the beehive, only to discover that there was another, and another, and another.  Twenty five in all.  I guess my friends couldn’t resist “poking” fun at me.

And when I went to get my grad photo taken, my mother wagged her finger at me and told me, in no uncertain terms, that I would be sorry in years to come to have my picture taken with this gigantic head of hair.  For once she was wrong.  The photo has been the subject of much laughter over the years.

I grew up in a household of ten with one bathroom.  We raised our own family of six with a solo loo for the first fourteen years.  Now that the kids have left home, the battle for the bathroom is a distant memory.  Two people and two bathrooms, which is just about perfect.  I’m also much more efficient as I prepare for work in the morning.  Washing my hair entails a brief passage of my hand over a barren landscape.  As time goes on washing my hair will be reduced to, well, washing a single hair.  I’m getting close.

Mercifully my barber recognizes the path that I am going down.  We have given up talking about hairstyle, length etc.  He simply puts on the number 1 blade and five minutes later, the job is done.  I get two price breaks;the senior’s discount and the bald guy rebate.  Truthfully, I go to the barbershop more out of habit than necessity as it is a chance to get caught up on what’s happening on “The Main”.

I would gladly take back a few of those blond curls from my childhood.  But then. I would have to buy a hairdryer.  I only use a hair dryer these days to thaw frozen locks on our car.

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