Just Like It Is Now, But Shorter

On haircuts, hiding, and the senior discount I didn't ask for

It’s Saturday morning again, and I’m thinking I’m overdue for a haircut. It’s always painfully obvious, at least to me, when I need a haircut. It’s when my sideburns have grown bushy and unkempt, widening my already too wide face, and my hair springs out from underneath the sides of my hat like the wings of a bird.

Let’s talk about the hat, because it’s important, at least to me. I’ve worn a baseball hat since I was fourteen years old. Not for any particularly good reason, like I’m covering up the rapid onset of male pattern baldness or I’ve decided to take up a sport on the backside of my middle-age years. I just feel most comfortable when I’m wearing one and my head is covered. Ask anyone who’s known me for any extended period of time, if you see me without a hat on it looks odd. I don’t know why I wear one. I started wearing it at a time in my life where I wanted to hide and part of me thinks that has continued for the past thirty-five years.

I’m forty-nine, I still wear one almost every day. Along with a faded UConn shirt or a solid-colored t-shirt and a pair of jeans, it’s become what my children a my “dad uniform.” The current 100% polyester, fitted iteration is a faded and stained Red Sox hat that has molded itself to the shape of my head the way only a good hat can. I’m unable to wear a hat that isn’t fitted due to the prodigious size of my noggin. Being that I have a large head, the one-size-fits-all hats with the strap in the back are woefully inadequate and leave my Shrek-sized cranium looking more ridiculous than normal. So I cycle through a never-ending stream of fitted hats, always in size 8, and mostly belonging to my beloved baseball team in Boston. It’s worked for me so far and I plan to continue. Eventually the hats will become soiled beyond any reasonable attempt to clean them and must be replaced. Much like the extinction events of Earth, this has happened five times and I fear we are well on our way to the sixth. But I will hold out as long as polite society will allow me.

Anyway, back to my hair. Now, I’m not a fancy man and I’ve always been ‌more form and function over style kind of person, so I’ve never voluntarily gone to a hairdresser or one of those hipster barbershops to have my hair cut. I have been forced a time or two, but I’ve never gone of my own accord. I find describing the style of haircut I want to be exhausting and unnecessary. And apparently, when being how I would like my hair cut, replying with, “Just like it is now...but shorter” isn’t as helpful, or as funny, as I think it is.

Like I said, I spend most of my life with my head covered, so I’m not looking for artistry, I’m looking to make sure the hat fits and my head doesn’t get overly sweaty in the oppressive Texas summer. So, I go to the Great Clips in Rowlett, Texas. The same one every time. A small, friendly Vietnamese woman always cuts my hair. Her name is Anna, or at least that’s what the receipt says. I don’t know if she chooses me or if it just works out that way, but it’s been long enough now that I’d feel strange if someone else called my name to a chair. I think she’d feel strange too, though I can’t be sure about that. We’ve never talked about it. We’ve never really talked about anything. I may be reading too much into our monthly arrangement.

I take the hat off when I sit down in her chair. It’s one of the few places that I do outside of the house. I place it in my lap as she places some stretchy ribbon paper around my neck and swings a nylon barber cape over me

I like the routine of this whole experience. I enjoy sitting in the waiting area and not talking to anyone. A row of plastic chairs, everyone looking at their phones, me writing furiously in my pocket notebook, no one talking to or expecting anything from me. This is about as close as I’m comfortable getting to other members of humanity. I enjoy the rhythm of routine. I enjoy the silence. I even enjoy the 80s and 90s music that is always playing at this location.

When Anna is ready, her tools are lined up on a small, clean towel in front of me, everything sanitized and in its place, like a careful still life arranged at the start of each day. It makes me feel good to see them. There’s something quietly sacred about a person who takes the time to lay things out right before they touch you. It tells you they care about what they’re doing, even if it’s the thirtieth haircut of the week, even if you’re just another man in a plastic smock who has a chronic inability to explain what he wants. There’s a bit of a language barrier between us, and I appreciate that too. She asks me questions in a sometimes thick accent and I answer yes to pretty much everything. The one exception is the eyebrows. They are the one part of hair on my head that has resisted the graying process, so far, and they are a prominent feature of my face. (I blame my parents.) They always offer to trim them, and I always decline. I handle that myself, ever since one unfortunate mishap a decade ago where I was forced to spend a month looking like a charter member of the Manson family. Some of life’s lessons only need to be learned once.

I don’t need to make conversation. I don’t need to perform. And maybe that’s what I appreciate most about Anna. There are people in your life you talk to every day and never really know, and there are people you barely talk to at all who somehow know exactly what you need. Anna and I have built something in that second category. It’s not friendship exactly. It’s not nothing either. I am her customer and that is good enough for me.

Thanks to a printed slip of paper when I check in she knows exactly how I like it cut without having to ask questions that I can’t answer. She knows I’m going to say yes to everything. She knows I’m on the tall side and that the chair won’t go low enough for her to clip my hair comfortably. I’m six foot two with a thirty inch inseam, which means I’m mostly torso, and I’m often forced to slouch in the chair so she can reach the top of my head. (Again, I blame my parents.) I can always tell when it’s time because she pumps the pedal to lower the chair over and over to no effect. So I slide down and fold myself into something more manageable, and she carries on without a word. We’ve done this enough times that it’s choreography now. A little dance we do every month that neither of us has to think about.

The buzz of the clippers soothes and lulls me, and for a few minutes the world gets small and manageable and fine. Even if the sideburns routinely come out a bit uneven, I’m grateful for her hands and her attention. She always does good work.

Today when I was paying I looked at down at the receipt. It said Senior Haircut, eighteen dollars.

I turned forty-nine years old three weeks ago.

Forty-nine is a strange age. You’re not old enough for anyone to feel sorry for you and not young enough for anyone to give you the benefit of the doubt. You’re just there, on the downslope of the middle of your life, watching things shift in ways that are too slow to fight and too fast to ignore. The gray came on gradually and then all at once, the way these things do. One year I had a few silver hairs at the temples and the next year I looked like a different person. My kids didn’t say anything about it. My granddaughter Clara doesn’t know me any differently. But I notice it every morning when I look in the mirror before I put the hat on. That’s the thing about getting older. The people who love you stop seeing it long before you do.

My knees ache when I stand up from low chairs. I make sounds now when I bend over to tie my shoes. One time I sneezed too hard and spent a week laying on the kitchen floor, my back unable to bend without exceptional agony. I’ve started getting junk mail from AARP, which feels like a threat. The world has started treating me like a certain kind of man, the kind who gets called sir by teenagers and offered help with bags at the grocery store. I’m not that man yet. Or maybe I am and I just haven’t caught up to it.

Now I have questions. Not complaints, never complaints. Questions. Did Anna look at me and think, that man is surely sixty-five? Was it the gray? There’s a lot of it now, and it’s the one thing the hat can’t hide. Or did she just decide to knock two dollars off because she’s kind and I’m a regular and that’s what you do for the man who shows up every month and says yes to almost everything you ask?

I don’t know. I can’t ask her. I wouldn’t ask her. And honestly, I’d rather not know. I’d rather sit with the mystery of it. Either I look old enough to qualify for a senior discount at forty-nine, which is humbling in a way that only a receipt can be, or a woman who cuts my hair did me a small and quiet kindness for no reason at all. Which is something else entirely.

Both of those things are worth more than two dollars.

There are so few places left where you can sit with another person and not have to explain yourself. Where the silence between you isn’t awkward but earned. Anna’s chair is one of those places for me. I show up, I take off my hat, I sit down, and for fifteen minutes someone takes care of me without asking why I need it. That’s a rare thing in this world. That’s a rare thing at any age.

I tipped her fifteen on the eighteen-dollar cut. Because she lined up her tools on that towel. Because she took care of it. Because whatever she saw when she looked at me today, whether it was an old man or a regular or just a tall guy who says yes to everything, she treated me the same way she always does. I put the hat back on the moment she finished, the way I always do, and walked out into the parking lot feeling like myself again.

I’ll be back in a month. I’ll sit in the waiting area and not talk to anyone, scribbling away in a small journal. I’ll say yes to almost everything she asks me.

And if she gives me the senior discount again, I’ll take it

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