Haircuts

I hate having to go get a haircut. I rate it right up there with shopping. I don’t like to do either of them, but I do it because I have to. I know there are some people who will say that I should be happy that I still have hair to cut, but I still hate doing it. I go to the same place every time and I usually have one of two people that I’ve come to trust cut it each time. However, this last time I went, neither of my usual people were there and I actually got a double whammy.

First, I’ve never seen this person in the shop before so I’m assuming she is new. Second, she looked really young, like maybe she just got out of hairdressers school, or beauty school, or whatever they call it. Or worse, I’m thinking that she’s never even had any training. Perhaps, like my daughter, she started out cutting her Barbies' hair (my wife can attest to the fact that it was not a pretty sight). Maybe this young woman went from Barbies to her little brother – we’ve all seen the horrors of sibling induced hairdos on America’s Funniest Videos or the like. I almost turned around and left, but I really needed to get it cut. If my 12-year-old self could have seen me now, he would have been horrified that I even thought that it was necessary to get my hair cut. Times, and styles, change.

When I was young, I had no say in my hair style. When my friends were starting to grow their hair out, I still had a wiffle (or a buzz cut to some people). When my friends’ hair was over their ears, I was lucky that I still didn’t have a wiffle and could actually grow it out a little. In my family, we had an in-house barber and his name was Dad. He didn’t do fancy haircuts, nor did Dad do the latest styles. He had his own set of electric clippers, he put on the attachment for the length, and then it was zip, zip, zip – all your hair gone (just look at the family picture I use for this blog!). When I saw him setting up the stool in the middle of the dining room on a Saturday morning, even as a little guy I knew what was coming.

Apparently, so did one of my older brothers because he would take off to avoid Dad the Barber. This did not seem to bother Dad in the least. He'd say, “Don’t worry about him. He’ll be back.” After all, Dad wasn’t stupid. He knew that a teenage boy would have to come home to eat at some point. He’d be patient and bide his time, clippers at the ready. Now, I don’t know if this is my imagination or if it really happened, but it seems to me that you had to sit there and watch the other guys getting their hair cut while you waited your turn. Not that it took that much time. He didn’t let our hair get too long and, as I mentioned before, it was just a quick zip, zip, zip – all your hair gone. The older ones had some say, but us younger ones had no hope of letting the hair stay a bit longer.

I don’t remember when, but at some point Dad stopped being the family barber. I don’t remember where we went after that, either, but I do know that for as long as I can remember, I’ve not liked getting a haircut. Today, I still get shivers down my spine when I hear the buzz of the clippers near my ears, even if they’re not giving me a wiffle. I do my best to stay motionless so that there’s not one of those “Oops, I think I went too short” moments.

This story ends well, though. The new, young woman, cutting my hair for the first time, did a great job. I didn’t look like Moe from The Three Stooges, my hair didn’t look like it did in the blog picture, and when I got home my wife told me it looked great. Hey, if she likes it, then I have nothing to complain about. Overall, a good experience. And yes, I am happy that I still have hair to cut – even if there’s less of it each year and what’s left is getting grayer each year.

Finding Nemo

As we continue to dig out from Nemo here in the Northeast, I’m looking outside at a nice sunny day and the temperature in the 40’s. It always amazes me to see what a difference a couple of days can make. We had snow from early Friday morning until the middle of the day on Saturday, with plenty of wind to go along with it. When I finally got out and about, there was over two feet of snow, lots of fallen trees and tree limbs, and roads that were half as wide as they should be.

When the flakes finally stopped falling, my son, my wife and I went out to clear the driveway and dig out the cars, which you could barely even see. The snow was up to my mid-thighs in some places where it drifted and we had to go out the cellar door that’s covered by a deck because the front and side doors had so much snow against them we couldn’t open them. Fortunately, I have a snow blower. Unfortunately, since the snow was so deep it sputtered and choked and almost didn’t make it. It took us a little over two hours to get the driveway cleaned and the cars unburied. By the time we headed in, our faces were so frozen it was hard to complete simple sentences.

I’m not complaining. Last week just happened to be the 35^th anniversary of the notorious Blizzard of 1978, and though we didn’t get that much more snow than Nemo dumped on us, that particular storm was much worse. In the aftermath of the Blizzard of 1978, it took six of us parts of two days to shovel the driveway and clean off the cars. We did have a huge driveway, probably big enough to fit ten cars easily, but we had no snow blower. We went out after breakfast and started shoveling, went in for lunch, and then went back out and shoveled until it was getting dark. For two days! Comparatively speaking, two hours with a snow blower doesn’t seem so bad, even if we were pretty cold.

I remember so many times as a kid when we were outside sledding or having snowball fights and we refused to go inside the house despite being numb from the cold. I think we knew that once we went in, we weren’t coming out again (unless we were playing ice hockey and just went home for lunch – that was different). We’d go in, take off all our wet, snowy clothes and sit in front of the fireplace. I swear that for the first ten minutes I couldn’t even feel the heat from the fire. I could have put my frozen feet right into the fire and not felt the flames, but the smell of flesh mixed with dirty socks might have been lethal to all of us. Mom would make us some hot chocolate and we’d sit there for a while and thaw out. That’s why once you were in, you were in for good. 

It was all about choices at that point. You could sit in front of the cozy fire in some warm, dry clothes, or you could put on your still wet jacket, gloves and hat and go back outside into the cold. Though there were some instances we did go back outside, the decision to just stay put was fairly easy. Warm vs. cold; dry vs. wet. On those days, Swiss Miss Instant Cocoa (with mini marshmallows!) was like drinking liquid Godiva chocolate. There was nothing better. We sipped it slowly, not only because it was hot, but also because we just wanted to make it last.

Though the days of sipping hot chocolate in front of a roaring fire are long gone, snow storms in New England are not. We don’t get as many as we used to, or so it seems, but every once in a while we get whacked upside the head by a blizzard. For me, there’s no sledding, snowball fights or playing in the snow anymore, just a strong desire to be inside where it’s warm and dry.