Stay-at-home led to shaggier look

Let’s talk about hair.

I currently have too much of it.

And my guess is that you do too, unless you were fortunate enough to get an appointment with your barber or stylist after Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb started the reopening process.

As a kid, I had a buzz cut. Not quite a military version, but it was definitely a crew cut.

Trimmed short all over, it seemed to emphasize the shape of my head. In old family photograph albums, I tend to bear a striking resemblance to Charlie Brown of Peanuts fame. (My dog wasn’t named Snoopy, but my success as a baseball player was certainly equivalent to Charlie’s.)

At that point, the cool guys had what was known as a pineapple. Lord knows why, but that’s what the haircut was called.

It was essentially a crew cut with a bit of longer hair, sort of a tuft or tassel, over the forehead.

For reasons I’ve never quite understood, my parents found the pineapple cut to be something too avante garde or risqué or something. (Maybe it was a Presbyterian thing, like not going to the movies on a Sunday unless the film met an undefined standard for wholesomeness.)

But the guys with the pineapple were outclassed by those with flat-tops, haircuts that you could test with a level and be sure the bubble wouldn’t move. A step above that — in the haircut-ranking system of the 1950s and early ’60s was a flat-top with a ButchWaxed curl right in the middle of the forehead, sort of like a hood ornament on a particularly hot car.

Those, of course, were for other guys. I was a buzz cut.

In fact, I was a home-barbered buzz cut.

My mother, looking to save the 25 or 50 cents it cost for the gents at Antrim’s to mow down my latest growth and make me presentable now and then, bought a kit from, I am almost certain, Sears-Roebuck.

It wasn’t something she would use on my older brother or my sisters or my father.

I alone was the guinea pig.

When I had finally reached the point where my scruffiness was more than she could bear, we’d head up to the “sewing room” and I’d get a trim.

And, for awhile, it all went OK. After all, there’s not very much you can mess up with a buzz cut.

Until, that is, one fateful day my mother lowered her arm and the trim guide fell off. Her next stroke across my Charlie Brown dome was like a buzz saw on my scalp. A streak of bare skin went from the back to the front, sort of a reverse Mohawk effect.

Needless to say, that ended the home haircutting experiment.

Sometime around junior high school, I decided the crew cut was done. I’m not sure what to call what followed, but I had a little more growth on top and there was something like a part. Not quite a pineapple, it might have been a grapefruit for all I knew.

And that was fine until a little thing called The Beatles.

Suddenly, all those guys with flat-tops looked like geezers. More hair spelled more fun; it certainly spelled more girls, and that was a factor.

But more hair also translated into parental tension.

It wasn’t so much that it was an act of rebellion. (OK, maybe a little bit.) But it was an act that was perceived as rebellion, and the perception was as important as the reality.

Off to college in 1966, I had few clear ambitions. One — perhaps the only one that I was able to articulate at 17 — was to let my hair grow.

And grow.

That, of course, didn’t play well at home.

In November of my freshman year, I called home from college on a pay phone and asked my father what he wanted for his birthday.

His answer: A haircut. Mine.

I complied, but it was painful.

About three and a half years later, I was studying abroad and hitchhiking solo around Europe.

And I was letting my hair grow. And grow.

Back in the States at the end of an amazing summer, I had it down nearly to my shoulders, bleached blond by the sun.

So, because I didn’t want to give my dad a heart attack, I knew I had to get it cut.

Connie, my fiancé at the time, did the honors. But she didn’t do herself proud.

She’d never attempted a haircut like that and was winging it.

The end product — me — looked as if I’d had a bowl placed on my head while the rest was cut with shears. If you’ve ever seen the Dutch Boy paint logo, you’ll have some idea what I looked like.

She has cut my hair since then and has done a good job, but it’s not something she’s attempted for a couple of decades. And she hasn’t been thrilled about the prospect of taking a whack at it during the coronavirus pandemic.

Instead, both of us have waited until our favorite stylist has openings on her calendar and can do the job right.

In the meantime, I’m woollier and shaggier than I have been in years. I figure it’s grown an inch while you were reading this column.