Conversation with My Wife (160)
“Gimme a head with hair / Long beautiful hair”
Anyone can publish about haircuts on Medium per their Policies, but they don’t fact-check every story, because they’re publishers, dammit Jim, not hairdressers! For more info about cutting your own hair, see a site that has a clue.
I like to keep my hair short. What’s left of it, anyway. (I’m totally bald on top, Karma’s way of punishing me for making fun of my father when I was a kid.) It’s been a few weeks since my last haircut, which was really more of a quick trim, since the whole COVID-19 thing hadn’t sunk in yet when I was at the barber shop. Having to brush hair off my ears was starting to get to me, and Deb remarked that the back of my head was looking a little shaggy around the collar.
We don’t have real hair trimmers, but I have my beard trimmer, and that’s basically the same thing, right? So Deb ran it over the back of my head before I got in the shower (fewer hairs scattered over everywhere), and I was good to go.
Well, except for around the ears. That still bothered me. So maybe just touch that up before I shower, I thought to myself.
Deb had gone downstairs by this point. I was bereft of adult supervision, in other words.
I did not pay attention to the closeness setting on the trimmers. Also: I was not wearing my glasses, because the whole point was to trim around the ears and glasses interfere with that.
Those of you who know me (or have small children who have “given themselves haircuts”) can figure out where this is going.
So, not long afterward, I had my sides trimmed more than I’d planned, but not badly so. Great! I took my shower, washed my head, dried off, put my glasses back on, and looked in the mirror.
ME: (speechless)
Turning the narrative over to my wife, who related the story to a friend two days later:
DEB: So I had trimmed his hair, using his beard trimmers, and I thought I had done a pretty good job, really. And then he comes down from his shower, and he’s trimmed the sides of his head with the trimmers on setting “1” for the closest setting, but he hasn’t done the back of his head at all, and the sides aren’t even. I look at him and say, “You look like a concentration camp inmate. Or worse.” And he says, “Well, in concentration camps there were other prisoners who were barbers.” So then we were going on our weekly grocery run, and he asks if he should wear a hat, and I say, “Well, we’ll have masks on, and nobody will be looking at your hair, but yes, I think it might be a very good idea to wear a hat.” So he tries on a stocking cap, and it’s tempting, but we go with a ball cap, and make it through the grocery run without scaring anyone. But the next morning I take his beard trimmers and try to even up the back and sides, and we have a fistful of hair cut off before the battery on the trimmers dies. But at least he doesn’t look awful from the front. As much. And then I finished off the haircut this morning after the trimmers recharged. Our Facebook friends assure us it will grow back.
Ah, yes, our Facebook gang! Some, like Jk Mansi and Meg (yes, we connect on FB also) had sympathetic thoughts or examples how other attempts had gone worse (thanks, Juhi). Others, like Dennett and Karen DeBonis wanted photos, so I posted the one above that shows me just from the front. Erika Burkhalter was sweetly complimentary when she saw the photo, but she’s still recovering from COVID-19 and may not be totally in her right mind just yet. Harper… was Harper, let us leave it at that.
Other FB friends pointed out that there are a lot of articles online showing how to do self-haircuts (well, fine, NOW I know that!) or how things could have gone worse.
Several people were complimentary, or at least only mildly sarcastic. A cousin, on the other hand, posted “I have seen much worse” because #family.
I was asked if I was going to shave my beard; I assured the Facebook community this was not the case, since I look awful without one. My ex-wife then posted that “I’ve seen you without a beard!!! Strikingly handsome as a young junior Naval officer.” Might have just been the quarantine booze talking, but still, she’s a sweetheart.
Deb has made it known that I will not, under any circumstances whatsoever, be taking trimmers, scissors, clippers, or even a large comb to her hair. She’ll wait until the all-clear and find a professional.
Copyright ©2020 by Jack Herlocker. All rights reserved; I have a fully-charged beard trimmer, and I will hunt you down and give you the best haircut I know how.
