Before the Cut photo by Marcia Sloane
“You are responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Today, the first of April, Easter, 2018, no kidding, Marcia is giving me a haircut. The weather has turned warmish, finally, the Japanese maples are leafing out, the huckleberries have set prodigious quantities of blossoms for the second year in a row and the bumblebees are loudly pollinating those blossoms, the hummingbirds are zooming around looking for flowers and love, the mouth of Big River is teaming with harbor seals, and life she is on the upswing.
I only brush my hair when I happen to look in a mirror, which is not often. Thus my hair is frequently in a state of disarray, and when my hair is long I resemble a gray-haired Bozo the Clown. In the 1960s and 70s I wanted to grow my hair long enough to have a ponytail, but even when I went without a cut for four years, my hair only got about five-inches-long all around and thereafter the tips grew brittle and broke off. Nowadays I enjoy a little extra fur during the winter, and when spring has sprung, Marcia tames the tangle.
When I was a boy, my mother would take me to a barbershop every six months and a not-very-friendly man would cut off most of my hair. They called this a crew cut, though it might have been called a shaved head. I hated getting haircuts, but after a day or so of my ears feeling cold, I forgot about my hair, not being one who looked in mirrors.
While in a Bozo-the-Clown phase, as I have been for some months now, my hair elicits comments from people I know and from people I don’t know. Interestingly, nearly all these comments are complimentary, in a roundabout way. For instance, a woman coming out of the grocery store a few days ago startled at the sight of me and said, “Whoa. Great hair.” Subtext: You actually scared me a little, but I appreciate the wildness.
In the post office, a woman with hair even more topsy-turvy than mine, grinned at my coiffure and said, “Way to go.”
Marcia recently underwent a radical change in her hair style, her first major style shift since several years before we got together eleven years ago. The Marcia I married had long blonde hair that fell nearly to her waist. Indeed, she was renowned in Mendocino as the principal cellist of Symphony of the Redwoods with gorgeous long blonde hair, and as the cellist in the Mendocino Music Festival orchestra with gorgeous long blonde hair. Thus when she got most of her hair cut off last year, dozens of people came up to me at the first orchestral concert of the music festival and said one of two things. “Marcia cut her hair!” or “Where is Marcia?”
My answers were, “Yes, she did,” and “She is there with short hair.”
My haircuts, by contrast, do not prompt widespread alarm in the community. In fact, only a few people will notice that I’ve gotten the haircut I am about to get because I am not locally renowned for my hair or anything else. If I were to start wearing a suit and tie every day, some people in town would notice my wardrobe change and wonder why I no longer wore Giants sweatshirts. However, to elicit multiple comments about my hair I would have to dye my mop pink, and I think pink hair would make me look weird. Weirder.
When I lived in Berkeley, I got a haircut every six months. I would walk to Solano Avenue where, guided by chance and intuition, I would choose one of the several hair cut joints staffed by Chinese women who spoke little or no English. I would enter the joint, wait for someone to gesture at an empty barber’s chair, and say politely, “May I please have my hair cut short on the sides and leave some on top.” And then I would surrender to the gods of haircuts.
On one occasion, a young woman began cutting my hair and after a few minutes stopped to confer with another young woman who then took over cutting my hair. After a moment, this second woman stopped cutting my hair and called over an older woman who studied my hair for a moment, smiled at me and said, “You hair no lie down. Only go up when cut short. No can brush down.”
“Yes,” I said. “Is okay. Cut short on sides, leave some on top.”
And then to put them at ease, I told my favorite haircutting joke. “You know the difference between a good haircut and a bad haircut?”
The three women looked at me with obvious concern and said many things to each other in Chinese.
“Two weeks,” I said, and when it was clear they didn’t understand the joke, I tried to explain why it was funny, which is never a good idea, and then I told the joke again, which caused the older woman to nod emphatically and say, “Yes, okay. You come back two weeks. Sure. We cut some man hair every week.”
Now the deed is done. Marcia worked uncharacteristically fast today, snipping and fluffing and snipping, and she seemed to enjoy the process this time, which has not always been the case.
I certainly feel lighter and more intelligent. I don’t know why getting a haircut sharpens the mind, but it does for me. Perhaps we receive vital information from the collective consciousness through our hair, and by removing the old brittle hair tips, my reception of useful data has improved. Let’s hope so.
I saved the hair that was previously attached to my head, and once I get the fire going in the woodstove this evening I will burn those detached locks in a ritualistic pagan Easter Passover rebirth ceremony, no kidding, to bid farewell to old fears and erroneous assumptions that have been holding me back from optimal appreciation of this moment.
After the Cut photo by Marcia Sloane