March 18, 2020…For a week, it had been one “WTF?!?” moment after another. Sports leagues shut down. Colorado abruptly closed its ski areas. The French stopped eating in restaurants, even on the sidewalk. Schools closed, universities sent students home. Microsoft and Amazon shuttered offices. Public health physicians advised everyone to stay home, except for “essential” services: life-and-death doctor visits, grocery and medicine shopping. We heard it might be a year or more before a vaccine protecting against the “novel coronavirus” would be available.
I had finished my skiing for the season, time for the barber to trim my hair, now that I no longer needed it to stay warm on the slopes. Back to swimming and sweating while preparing for another triathlon season, I valued shorter locks for the comfort and ease provided.
“Think I’ll stop off for a haircut after the pool,” I told Cheryl.
“Wait, is it safe to go in the water, to the Y? They’re saying stay away from gyms and everything,” she noted. “And barber shops – are they ‘essential’?”
“I’m not worried – won’t the chlorine kill any virus? I mean, you’re mostly underwater, more than 6 feet away from anyone. I think I’ll be OK.”
That night, our governor, who had declared a state of emergency less than three weeks earlier, issued orders for all those “non-essential” businesses to close up shop. No Y, no gym, no barber.
Sitting in front of the computer, digesting the news, I called Cheryl over, and asked her if she would cut my hair now, just for the emergency. She stared back at me, a beguiling smirk warding off any further pursuit of something she’d been refusing since 1975.
“You can let it grow a little, can’t you?” She tousled my hair, mussing my careful comb job.
I grumbled, trying to make the two inches up top look presentable again. From nowhere, inspiration hit. “That’s it. I’m not going to get a haircut until I’m vaccinated,” I announced.
“Good. I like it long. All these years, short for surgery, then for triathlon – you look better when it’s longer.” She reached out for another flick at my head, which I quickly dodged.
Inspired, I defiantly added, “Or I may die with a pony-tail!”
She cocked her head, imagining me with hair flowing down my back. “Just like Willie Nelson,” she mused.
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Class pictures from Kindergarten through third grade show me with very short hair, sometimes long enough to lie flat, sometimes bristly short. My father had grown up having his hair cut in his family’s ranch-house kitchen in eastern Montana during the ‘20s and ‘30s. A couple of years at the Naval Academy accustomed him to the 90-second plebe cut featured at Annapolis. An upside-down economy during World War II and a wife willing to help save money by learning barbering skills solidified his belief that haircuts looked best when done at home.
At first, my mother tried to corral me into keeping still long enough to let her cut my hair. But mothering is hard enough without worrying whether you’re going to snip off your son’s ear. My father went out and bought a new hair care set, including scissors with a little curved finger rest, two types of combs, scissors with teeth for getting those recalcitrant longer hairs out of the way, and, most important, an electric clipper, and took over the job.
By the time I was four, I’d learned that my parents did not have total control over all my thoughts and deeds, so I began rebelling when I got the chance. Saturday mornings, every month or two, in the kitchen with a vinyl drape around my neck, I’d squirm, fidget, and complain enough that my father, to avoid smacking me literally up-side the head, began five years of buzz-cuts for me with those clippers. Just like in the Navy, a minute and a half, and we’re done. It took longer to sweep the floor afterwards.