Hi,
I just had my worst haircut ever.
Needless to say, competition for that award comes amidst a strong field, not that anything about a decade-long battle with male pattern balding makes the enterprise uplifting, every shearing a reminder of long-lost follicle glory.
Still, this haircut was terrible.
First of all, I was feeling guilty about this Substack newsletter. In over a year, between the last post and this one is the longest I've gone without posting something here. While the handful of people who actually read what I write (thanks as ever) may not care about or notice such gaps, I had promised myself I would post something today before my noon appointment at the barber. My last post was about 9-14 and was meant to be the first part of a two or three-parter about God. But I got hopelessly stuck with all that and had nothing ready when I left my current abode at 11:55.
Five minutes later I learned that the appointment I had made online was not at this local spot, a spot I had been surprised to learn was so cheap, but at a barber across town. (My internet competence and my grooming issues somehow deserve one another.) This meant I had to call the other shop and apologize and, given the situation, accept a cut at double the price from a woman whose salon was, I noticed, suspiciously unbusy.
With nothing published and a promise to myself broken, and after apologizing to the barber across town, I sat down preparing to be broke but, I hoped, to at least look O.K.
Let’s talk uniformity. Not good in food, not preferable in people or experiences, we can agree that in hair length left and right and for beard style on one side and the other, uniformity has value.
Well, either the woman cutting my hair has no interest in that value or no ability to conjure it, because here I am looking as though I got drunk and went at what fur I have left with a variety of tools, none of them meant for cutting an old man’s hair.
For the record, the woman who gets my award as the worst barber ever could not have been nicer. She came to the Netherlands thirty years ago from Afghanistan. Her husband, a diplomat, got chased out by the Russians and the Taliban and she admitted that the first years here were hard. Some people say “hard” in a fashion that registers and she is one of these.
And while she was cutting my hair a man older than I am stuck his head in the door to ask if an elderly woman could come and sit in the shop as she waited for the bus. This, of course, was fine, and a moment later a lady made it through the door and to a chair with an unsteady gait. All gratitude for the older man and my barber, she was a reminder not everything is about how you look or even how you make others look.
There’s a wonderful song by Eric Bazillian that Alanis Morrisette sang “What if God were one of us.” Maybe you were in the chair of God the Barber, sitting next to God the old woman with sore feet. Maybe you wrote about God after all.