Barbers On My Mind

It took me forever – and a whole year of Lisa’s cajoling – before I went to a barber in NoCo. I just didn’t see the point. I buzzed my own bald head fringe and shaved my face. I still had not joined the mountain man look of my area.

When I first started writing novels in 2019, I began growing my beard back in. I don’t think I consciously made a decision that I needed a beard to write, but it did seem to fit the creative aesthetic. Plus, it came in white. An added benefit was that it also kept my face warmer during these cold NoCo winters.

The white frame also hid some of the more obvious effects of getting older.

At first, I continued to self-manscape. I brought a buzzer – actually a number of them – and once a month edged the neck and cheeks and carved an opening to the fur wall that had covered my mouth. It wasn’t pretty – function over form. Lisa hated it.

And my Irish eyebrows ran rampant on my forehead. They attested to my growing creative mania.

Finally, a few years back, Lisa made me go to an actual barber.

My first experience was traumatic. The barber I found wasn’t fluent in English and had one dead eye. I held my breath when he took the straight edge to my neck. He understood my instruction that I wanted my wild beard “tightened” to mean cutting it down to a little longer than a five o’clock shadow. Not a good look.

I went back to self-barbering. Lisa went back to complaining about the results. I believed I was providing Lisa a kindness by giving her something to complain about with her otherwise perfect husband. I mean, I didn’t want other women knowing that Lisa had found a truly faultless man. They may resent her.

But Lisa was willing to risk exposure and after I butchered my beard for another six months, she made me go looking for another real barber.

That’s when I spotted a Barber sign right by the Berthoud Post Office. I walked into the Rustic Rose Hair Salon and discovered a lovely Latina named Anna Kaye Martinez-Hernandez.

Anna The Barber – The Wise Novelist

Anna And Claire’s Hat – The Wise Novelist

For the next three years, Anna spent an hour each month transforming my lost cause mug into an almost human visage. And given that the Irish cannot be psychoanalyzed –

Was Freud right? Is psychoanalysis of no use to the Irish?

that monthly meeting was as close as I have ever come to a therapist session.

Anna also loved to read my books, so I would share them with her in monthly tranches while I wrote them. I even included Anna as a character – a Harlem barber who cleans up Doc – in Free R.A.D.I.C.A.L.

Well, like anything that wonderful, it couldn’t last. Anna retired to handle some magical family matters, and my beard was again subject to my self-flagellation. Lisa did her best to allow me time to recover from the separation, but finally she said, enough!

So, this past summer I went looking again for a barber.

I drove around Berthoud until I spotted a possibility –

Forbici Barber Werx

and thought that it was a tres chic name for a barbershop in Berthoud Colorado – Forbici being “scissors” in Italian – so I went inside and I met the two barbers that captained their chairs – Tommy and Ryan. Tommy is closer to my age, and a transplant from down South who has worked the tonsorial entertainment circuit, so I went with the common age and cultural ground – Tommy has a great barber banter –

Ryan is a really nice guy as well.

And so yesterday I had my last barber appointment before turning 70, because Lisa and I have to make our appearances at the girl grans’ grandparents day event at their school on Friday, because I know the urchins would publicly call me Poppa Smurf in their classrooms if I didn’t get a nice shearing.

And there you have it.

For the next few days, I can play the silk purse from the sow’s ear, before my beard and eyebrows returns to the wild.

And speaking of returning, Thursday has again returned for my fine, five readers. I can hear Friday whispering “th weekend awaits,” from the shadows.

You know what to do. Get that cuppa down the hatch and launch into your workday with the determination of wrapping up whatever project you have been working on. Stay as late as you need to and when it’s all done put a pretty a bow on it.

Tomorrow, you can present it to the powers that be and then take off to weekend land.

But no matter what else we get up to, let us make today a great one.