Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Jan’s Clippers
Before the pandemic, my husband got his hair cut at a place that charged $5. He gave the guy a $5 tip, making the total price of a haircut $10, way less than other barbers charged and not even a quarter of what I pay for a haircut.
For months into the pandemic, he let his hair do its wild crazy curling thing. It was cute in a lock down sort of way. Meanwhile I started ordering headbands on Amazon to deal with my short-cropped hair suddenly getting in my face. Going to a barber or hair salon was right up there in the COVID red zone. We had made a pandemic pact summed up by this phrase: no mistakes.
“I think you’re going to have to cut my hair.” This announcement was flabbergasting. After 36 years and countless $5 haircuts (well, $10, if you count the tip), I was to become my husband’s barber. My husband is a Bruce Willis hairstyle guy. So it is easy to cut his hair with a good pair of clippers which I bought, of course, on Amazon.
The first time was mesmerizing – the hum of the clippers, the harvest of black and gray hair falling on the floor, running my hand over his smooth, shaved head. Chair in the middle of the kitchen, bath towel around his shoulders, he just sat still, not for a single second registering any concern about my lack of skill. He never asked to look midway, never criticized, even asked me to clip his eyebrows so he didn’t “look like Brezhnev.”
Running the clippers over his head, trimming around his ears, lining up his neck, checking to make his sideburns matched – it felt like making a quilt with old dress scraps in the Depression – useful and simple, evidence that we could really fend for ourselves a lot more than we thought we could.
A few months back, when we thought the pandemic was waning and we would be safe practically anywhere because we were vaccinated, I asked my husband if he was going back to the $5 barber. He’d always like the haircuts and loved the guy so I figured he’d say yes.
“He’s gone out of business. I drove by there yesterday. So, I guess you’re it.”
I took it as high praise.
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
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“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
You make me laugh! That was such an enjoyable read. Now my husband has so many ‘cow licks’, those impudent little circles that cause the hair to stick up in a thousand different directions, so when I cut his hair, he looks like Sonic the Hedgehog. Jan, you’re the bomb!! XxX