By Jim Hagarty
2007
Once a man, twice a child.
That is one of my favourite sayings, describing, as it does so succinctly, the inevitable stages of many people’s lives.
But I think the world is in need of another new nugget regarding the aging process and I suggest this ripoff of the adage in the first paragraph: Once long hair, twice a buzz cut.
There are little signposts along the journey that let you know this is a one-way trip you’re on and the day you are told, by the person who looks after your hair, that you don’t really need to come back any more, you feel yourself in semi-shock.
“When you’re using the trimmer on your beard,” says the hair stylist, “just keep on going over the rest of your head.”
She fires up her clippers and takes a run at it, just to show me the way.
Suddenly, l am transported back to Fred Guy’s barbershop in the little village of Monkton near our farm home and the simplicity of what was known back then as a “brush cut.” A few waves of his magic wand and I was back in peak trim.
It’s a bit sad, of course, to be rounding this turn, but a bit liberating as well. I now have one black comb (a bit bent) and one blue brush (fairly new) for sale and expect to earn a fair sum for both. I no longer have to worry about my hair getting “mussed up” and my baseball caps have never fit better. My total outlay from here on in on hair dryers I expect to add up, with both taxes added on, to zero. A bonus, I suppose, is that some people have been telling me all week that I look much neater. It was never one of my life’s goals to look neater, but I guess if this is considered a positive quality, then I’ll take it.
Another sign that time is moving ever so aggressively on has to do with a man’s “trousers” (as they call them in civilized, English-speaking nations) and how well they resist the pull of gravity. I remember many years ago having a good chuckle watching a pair of pants fall down around the ankles of an “old” man next door. First of all, he seemed oblivious to the fact that he suddenly had a lot of extra baggage hovering just above his sock lines and secondly, upon discovering this fact, he seemed not to care one whit about it.
The other night, while racing to move some backyard topsoil before the sun went completely down, I bent to heave some rocks when I felt a “pop” followed by a loosening around the waist, sure signs that a button had fled the scene. But hurry is a terrible thing, with the sun in such a rush to disappear, and so I decided to carry on. While hustling across the lawn with a wheelbarrow full of soil, I suddenly felt much cooler around the leg, thigh and groinal areas and knew that I had been struck by my karma: What we mock, we shall become!
Standing there in the middle of my yard with buzz cut above and no pants below, I had my “aha!” moment: Middle age seemed suddenly in my rear-view mirror.
My only possible salvation is the prospect that I might get in on a little of that “not caring a whit” attitude my neighbour seemed to have. Day by day, I feel that coming on and I can only think that that must be nature’s major compensation for all these completely undeserved changes.
Nevertheless, I can’t help but think that “Mother” Nature has a cruel streak.
