Hair Cuts
a story break
I have been doing a series of devotional based on a 30 day schedule. March has 31 day in it. So, today I will post a story. Tomorrow we will start our next “30 days in” series. Should I tell you now what book we will be focused on? I think I will let you find out tomorrow, April 1st.
Well, this isn’t as much a story as it is random thoughtds…about hair. More specifically hair cuts.
I’ve been getting my hair cut for nigh 60 plus years now and I still haven’t settled into a set plan. I can only recall a couple of hair cut experiences from my childhood. The first being the time my Uncle Ivan cut my hair. It is memorialized in a black and white photograph someone took. I’m sitting in a chair in a kitchen (I assume Ivan’s) with a towel draped around my neck and looking quite unhappy.
I don’t know what qualified my uncle to be a barber other than he apparently owned a pair of shears. This was before YouTube, so I know he didn’t have any online training. Online wasn’t even a thing back then. He was, as best I can recall, a school maintenance man with a farming background. Nevertheless, there he was cutting my hair.
If I were a betting man, I would wager he was playing stylist because dad was looking for a cheaper option. Which is funny in and of itself because my other memory of childhood haircuts was the regular trips to the Denver Barber school in downtown Denver, Colorado where Dad, myself, and my two brothers could get all of our haircuts for a dollar.
No, not a dollar each. A dollar for all four of us. Yep, a quarter a piece. As they say, you get what you pay for.
Speaking of Dad and my hair, there was a period where he enforced a strict hair code on us boys. But my brothers had shorter hair than I did. Someone asked him why I was given more latitude in that department. He said it was because of my ears and if I got my hair cut too short I (and I quote) “looked like a taxi going down the road with both doors open.”
Dad wasn’t into protecting our feelings.
Other than that I don’t recall much about childhood haircuts. I know I got them because I never looked like Samson.
When I started working at around 15 years old I was expected to get and pay for that myself. There was a little barber shop near the TG&Y where I worked. I used to go there and a really nice young lady worked there and for $2 she gave me a decent trim occasionally. And I do mean occasionally. I didn’t go often because $2 is what I got paid for an hour of labor. Plus, Dad gave up on any kind of hair code enforcement by the time I got to high school.
Since adulthood I have tried various spots. When I was a pastor near Adair I always went to Susie’s Hair Repair because Susie was a member of our church.
As a random aside - I wonder why stylists have a penchant for cutesy business names like that?
When we lived in Norman I went to the barbershop downtown. It was old school. The main barber was the third generation to own and work there. You always got a neck massage with your haircut. The massage involved the barber strapping a metal vibrating thing on his hand. The experience was kind of like someone holding a 1960’s Black and Decker sander against your neck. Without the sandpaper, of course.
For the last 20 years I never settled into one place to get my hair cut. I’ve tried a bunch of them. I’ve got no complaints about any of them. For a while I went with a burr and did it myself.
Just so you know, if you cut your own hair, you also get what you paid for.
For the past couple of years I have been doing a twice a year cut - roughly August and January. It gets a bit long and out of control in between. Since I’m still in the working realm and like to have opportunities to preach in churches, I have to keep that in check somewhat.
I appreciate people who have that part of life dialed in. They have been going to the same barber/stylist for years. They know what they want and how they want it to look.
I think I’ll just be a hair vagabond for the remainder of my life.
If I don’t have it figured out by now, I probably never will.
