Flashes of Panic

The joke is an old one. It actually refers to a Far Side cartoon, in which an emaciated-looking lamb with some tufty hair is standing at an open door with a few scraggly flowers while a mother sheep calls up the stairs, “Look, Luann, Bobby got sheared!”

I think of it every time I get a haircut, mostly due to a college habit of averaging about one haircut per semester. It’s not that long(er) hair looks good on me—quite the opposite, in fact—but that I simply couldn’t find time to make it happen, and when I did, I tended to get it cut as short as possible in an effort to put off the next one.

We went to a place in town we referred to as “The Racist Barber.” (The shop is still open, but under different management.) One of my teammates went there, and when the barber asked where he was from, he answered, “Washington, D.C.” The barber thought about that for a minute, then said, “They’ve got a lot of colored people down there, don’t they.” We mostly avoided conversation and went there for cheap haircuts.

One semester I skipped haircuts entirely until late in the track season. Before the conference meet, another of my teammates put as much of my mop as possible into a topknot (think head-hunters) and shaved everything that didn’t go in the elastic. One side effect of this was a report going back to my brother, a senior at a different college in the same conference: “Your brother is weird, man.” Another was an unusual visa photo (taken before the shave, I think) on my student ID for the summer, which I spent in St. Petersburg. “What a hooligan!” laughed my host-mother.

Now playing: Junk Bond Trader from Figure 8 by Elliott Smith