Haircut was a birthday gift

What’s the strangest birthday present you’ve ever given?
Mine was a haircut.
It was — no surprise here, folks — the 1960s.
I’d gone off to college pretty clean-cut, but on my few weekends home that fall, my father offered the opinion that I was getting a little scruffy.
By the standards of just a few years later, my hair was still within the clean-cut range. No ponytail. No headband. Nothing like it would look half a dozen years later.
But for my dad, it qualified as scruffy.
And when I called home one night early in November, planning on heading back to Portland for Thanksgiving, I asked him what he’d like for his birthday, which was the same week.
A haircut, he answered.
No problem, I thought. I’ll pony up $1.50 or $1.75 and send dad to John Moody or Everett Imes for a haircut.
Then he made it clear: It wasn’t his hair he wanted cut. It was mine.
Okay, I thought, I have no real money to spend. So, what the heck, I agreed to get it cut before coming home for Thanksgiving and his birthday.
That was about the first of November.
The month didn’t exactly fly by. I thought about the haircut daily and for reasons that are hard to explain, I dreaded it.
Part of it was cultural. Even a little hair over the ears was a statement of rebellion or at least generational difference. (The haircuts the Beatles sported in the mid-1960s look positively tame by today’s standards.)
And part of it was personal. I wanted to honor my father, but I was at that point in life where it was important for him to know I was my own person.
A little birthday promise slowly turned into something larger.
The situation was complicated by the fact that — at the time — I didn’t know anyone outside the realm of barbers who could cut my hair. Years later, my girlfriend — now my wife — would cut it. For awhile, my cousin’s wife, Pauline, cut it.
But finally, with the calendar days running down, there was little choice but to make the trek from campus into town to find a barber and get it cut.
Keep in mind that this was Richmond, circa 1966. The Earlham College campus was viewed by many in Richmond as a breeding ground for hippie activists; Richmond was viewed by many on the Earlham campus as a backwater of political reactionaries and bigots.
Within that context then, picture a somewhat shaggy freshman wandering into a barbershop he’d never patronized before and asking for a trim.
Just a trim, I said.
And I was keeping a sharp eye on the clippers when another patron came into the shop and — perhaps in cahoots with the barber — hung his coat in such a way that I could no longer see the mirror.
As you might expect, the clippers buzzed and buzzed. Then they buzzed some more.
When I finally stepped down from the chair and handed the guy his $2 or whatever it was, I at last got a look at myself in the mirror.
It could have been worse, I suppose.
But I looked as if I had been prepped for my fifth grade class photo.
The college student — an incipient rebel — had disappeared, replaced by an elementary school kid with a round head.
There was, in the end, only one good thing about it: My father liked his birthday present that year.[[In-content Ad]]