Welcome to another installment of “Dad, Interrupted.”
“Dad, Interrupted” is a weekly newsletter where I describe, in lighthearted, moderately embroidered stories, my family-man misadventures with my wife, my kids, my friends, my in-laws and assorted chuckleheads I bump into.
This week, I’ll ponder the world of hair. My own is getting straggly, and I need a haircut, and for 41 years of marriage my wife Jeanette has been my barber.
The last proper haircut I got may have been the day before our wedding. We went to a woman barber in Covington, Ky., where we were married, and as I sat in the barbershop chair Jeanette hovered over the poor woman, politely but continuously offering ideas and suggestions, painting her vision of how her groom’s head — that is, my head — should look in all the important wedding scenes — at the altar, kissing the bride, cutting the cake.
I don’t know if that poor lady barber ever again cut a prospective groom’s hair. But Jeanette has now had 41 years to put her vision of my head into practice.
Before Jeanette cuts my hair this afternoon, I’ve sketched out the highlights and lowlights of my hair, from childhood onward. It’s not quite an epic-size tale, but it does have its twists and turns.
I am perched on Dad’s paint-spattered stool in the cellar, wearing what every boy like me wore in the early 1960s: a white J.C. Penney T-shirt and blue dungarees (We did not call them “jeans” back then.) The dungarees are cuffed up a good six inches. Like many parents, mine bought overlong pants so they wouldn’t need to buy another pair anytime soon — even if I had a growth spurt.
Dad circles busily around me. He is shearing off my already-short hair with gusto; he is a sheep rancher and I am his prize Merino. The buzz of his hair clippers is the only sound in the house; my sisters, fearful for their own heads, have locked themselves in their room.
They have reason to worry. Dad liked the family hair short. Really short. I had a crew cut, and he once cut my sister Kathy’s bangs so short that she looked like Derek Jacobi in “I, Claudius,” that BBC series back in the 70s about the Roman emperor.
But this time my sisters have a plan. When Dad knocks on their door, they’re planning to yell “We’re trying on clothes!” This is very smart. Women’s clothes were a mystery to my father, so he had no idea how long “trying on clothes” would take. If they could stall him for a few hours, then the Mets game will start, and his cruel hair clippers will be safely back in their box.
Sadly, I had no such option.
Although Dad liked everyone’s hair short, I was his main target. He himself was as bald as an egg and wanted to save me from hairlessness, so he regularly gave me the shortest crew cut that Sears Roebuck technology could deliver.
His theory was, If your hair is really short then it’s really light, and if it’s really light then it won’t fall out of your head.
Mr. Mast, the father of my friend Bob, once said my father cut our hedges the same way he cut his kids’ heads. But while the hedges just looked short, I looked like a member of Hitler Youth who forgot his neckerchief.
Several years later, my friends Bob and Claude and I were splayed on the hood of my father’s Chevy. Another listless suburban afternoon. We were in our late teens and our hair was longish, as it was for pretty much every sentient male teenager in those years.
“You’re definitely going bald like your dad,” said Bob, examining my skull. “Oh, and could you move out of the sunlight? The reflection is blinding me.”
“Maybe you’re not going bald,” added Claude, also unhelpfully. “Maybe it’s just that your forehead is growing, kind of like Frankenstein.”
Sad to say, my friends were right. Either my father’s theory of hair loss was wrong, or, when I grew my hair to a rebellious but girl-attracting length in my mid-teens, I undid all the good that came from his crew cuts. Not only was my hairline moving north, but there were telltale hairs on my pillow in the morning. I worried daily, hourly about this, like any teenager would.
But once I got older, I stopped fretting. My forehead height seemed to stabilize. Even better, as my friends and I edged into middle age, their hair seemed to thin a bit. Mine didn’t. The worm has turned, I thought smugly.
But apparently the worm had more turns in him. One day when I was well into my 50s, I was browsing among the hundreds of photos that my wife Jeanette regularly snaps at each and every family event. In one picture, at the annual Flaherty barbecue, I did not recognize a man with his back to the camera.
“Who’s he?” I asked. “I have a shirt like that.”
“Yes, you do,” Clara said.
She and Jeanette looked at me, waiting for my synapses to slowly join hands.
“Jesus. Am I bald like that?”
“Maybe it’s the sunlight,” Clara said.
“Or maybe you’re just bald like that,” said Patrick. This was 40 years after I had lounged on my father’s car with Bob and Claude, and my son sounded exactly like them. Male teenagers are forever the same.
Of course, my family’s hair has had other dramas and evolutions. Clara’s hair is now a lovely brown, much changed from the white blonde hair she had as a kid. Patrick had strikingly striped hair as a kid, a stripe of blonde, a stripe of wheat, a stripe of brown, often cut in a bowl shape. Since his teens, his hair has been long and thick — I wish he could give me just a little. He wouldn’t miss it.
My wife Jeanette has strong views about hair. She likes it long, and don’t try to change her mind. My mother believed that women, once married and with children, should keep their hair short and what she would have called “sensible.” To put it mildly, Jeanette is not of that opinion, nor does she think women should let their hair go gray.
“Keep it long and color it,” she says. “Why the hell not?”
As for me, ignorance was the theme of my hair. Looking at that barbecue picture, I had no idea what had been transpiring in that back area of my skull. For years my hair looked decent from the front, and while I was dimly aware that some hair loss was happening somewhere, the barbecue photo showed a bald spot as big as a grapefruit, dotted with just a few forlorn strands of hair.
This is how the Amazon would look in nuclear winter, I thought.
Seen as a whole, my hair was a Potemkin Village. From the front it looked healthy and fine, but peek over the top or around the back and it was clear the front was just a shell, a facade, a pretense.
Why was I unaware of this large crater? I believe that after my self-conscious teenage years I stopped seeing my body as it actually was. When women get a distorted view of their bodies, they see themselves as worse than they really are. But men do the opposite. They see their bodies as better. Their hair is fuller than it really is, their waists are slimmer, their triple chins are double chins or maybe even single chins.
You could call this male pattern blindness. Guys just don’t notice that they’ve moved up a notch on their belts or that their feet are missing when they look down. If a man passes a shop window and sees that his middle bulges over his pants like a muffin top, he will suck his gut in.
“I was just slouching when I passed the window,” he’ll tell himself. “So I’ll just stand up straighter!”
Problem solved.
My Hair: A Life