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Some cause happiness wherever they go, others whenever they go…

I’m always up for a meaningful conversation; all the prospective interlocutor has to do is smile and look me in the eye. The smile suggests their willingness to engage; the eye contact, well, it emphasizes the importance of the subject matter to them.

I learned that from my mother when she tried to serve me meat fritters for dinner (her name for disguising yesterday’s overcooked beef chuck roast which was my father’s favourite); she somehow managed to fry the remnants of overdone burnt slabs of meat, but now covered in flour batter. Her smile was an acknowledgement that I didn’t like them, and the eye-contact was a disguised signal to me that she had made a special dessert for me if I finished the few fritters she had felt obliged to apportion to my plate to appease my father.

Complicated family signals like that from a young age taught me to judge the importance of reading faces which even the ubiquitous masks of Covid failed to eradicate. Now that I can see lips again, and unmuffled eyes are able to coordinate with other unfettered facial parts, I am again at home with strangers as if the pandemic had only been an indiscreet burp…

Of course a lifetime of habits are tough to eradicate; conviviality does not surrender easily, and anyway I usually continued to smile beneath my mask. But now that Covid has receded, every so often in a supermarket line up, if I encounter naked grumpy faces, I use the self-checkout area; I smile at whichever machine I am allocated hoping it only chides me softly for putting my just-scanned item on the wrong platform; hoping it can tell by my scan-speed that I am old. I sometimes hear an embarrassed elderly person on a nearby machine trying to hush theirs up with rude comments that I would assume they would never use in public if one of their grand children was with them. I’m not like that, though.

I’ve learned to be as patient with machines as with the people who push in front of me at a bargain counter in Value Village. I still smile at them, although my inner voice is all the while trying to abort the words forming in my mouth; I discovered long ago that harsh words don’t work as well as smiles where cheap clothing is concerned -or where dessert is contingent on politesse.

Unfortunately, even unbridled smiles and overweening eye contact are sometimes not enough; they occasionally merely distract me.

Like, say, on my unaccustomed trip to the barber the other day. I say ‘unaccustomed’ because as an octogenarian in full possession of his ungrizzled curls, I visit the barber only when I can no longer trim the hair on the back side of my head. In fact, I live in fear that my curls – or any of my hair, for that matter- may be consigned like a logged forest to the irremediable past tense if I dare to interfere with its accustomed freedom to grow. So, to be safe, when I do finally resort to visiting a barber, I immediately inform them that my curls are to remain intact, uncut, no-go areas… well it’s a her barber, usually: I have found that women have more respect for the emotional aspects of hair than their what-the-heck male counterparts.

At any rate, on that fateful day, there was only an unmet him within walking distance of my house (she shared the shop with him and and had apparently taken the day off). As I sat in the little shop in a seat surrounded by year-old magazines, I mentally rehearsed how to apprise him of my concerns; to wit, that I only required a ‘trim’, and in case he misunderstood my anxiety, explain what I thought were the primal needs of my aging curls and how I felt that they, like the fragile areca palm growing in a quiet corner of my living room, needed special treatment.

As soon as I was invited to sit in his barber-chair though, I became nervous and tried to smooth his ego and flatter his obvious hair experience with copious smiles and earnest eye-contacts in the mirror that I hoped wouldn’t foster the wrong message -you have to be careful about first impressions nowadays.

We both set off on a wandering conversation about politics; he was from the Levant and I had to ask him what that was. I had to admit I’d never been there, although I’d certainly put it on my bucket list for my next life. Then, because we were both of an Age, we tiptoed carefully along a path about Death and whether hair actually grew for a while after it happened. I learned a lot from that part of the conversation, but I found it helpful to keep making eye contact with him in the wall mirror to demonstrate that I was not shocked with our verbal journey. It is never a good idea to nod or shake your head during a haircut conversation.

Then, as he snipped, brushed, and wet my hair, he asked me if I was married.

I mounted a puzzled smile at the mirror and had to admit that I wasn’t but, curious, asked him why he felt a need to inquire.

He stopped snipping for a moment and grabbed a hand mirror from the shelf beneath his wall mirror so I could see the back of my head.

He asked me if I could see the several chunks of hair gone rogue back there; it was apparently how he could tell if his customers had tried to cut their own hair before deciding to come to him. He took the little mirror away, but I could still see him smiling as he continued on his clear-cut journey around my head.

Along the way, though, I noticed my head was becoming cooler, and unrecognizable; in my rush to befriend him, I had forgotten to mention that a ‘trim’ was all I had wanted. Now, I was no longer the person I saw in the bathroom mirror when I cleaned my teeth at bedtime. I risked jerking my head around to face him.

“I’m almost finished,” he said with a smile. “Doesn’t that look better now?” Perhaps it was the overhead fluorescent lighting, but I thought I saw a glint in his eyes.

“Where are my curls?” I said in a sudden panic.

He pointed to the floor around his chair with a satisfied smile. “The way you’d been cutting your hair at home made them difficult to salvage, but I think I managed pretty well, don’t you?”

Sans curls, my head looked strange, and I was afraid that when I put on my cap, it wouldn’t fit anymore; there would be no ringlets peeking out from underneath to anchor it. And now, in the wall mirror, I could only see one lonely remnant still peeking down over my forehead like a 1950ies Bill Haley kiss-curl.

“It’s the only one I could save,” he said, shrugging. “Don’t wait so long next time though, or I’ll have to charge you extra, eh…?” Then he chuckled at his clever badinage as he swept the floor so the next customer who walked in wouldn’t be worried about the mess of hair on the floor.

For sure I’m going to a female hairdresser next time…

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