Manyu likes my hair fairly short; I prefer it long. There is a hair length, however, where my hair starts to curl on the ends and then Manyu likes it long. The trick for me is to ignore her suggestions for a haircut until my hair completely covers my ears. She starts suggesting a haircut about two months after a previous trim, then stops around the three-month mark. (Our dog, by the way, is on a similar schedule.)
It just so happens that Manyu’s annual trips to Taiwan last almost exactly three months. I seldom get a haircut while she is away. This gives my hair enough time to pass through a period of shagginess and, at least in Manyu’s eyes, become stylishly long.
Manyu is in Taiwan right now,* and my plan was to not get a haircut until she came home. Then last week, only two weeks before my wife’s return from Asia, I got sick. According to my doctor, I don’t have COVID, I don’t have the flu, and I don’t have pneumonia. His diagnosis is that I have something else. I stayed in bed for four days, and today is the first day I felt well enough to work on a blog. Yesterday was the first day I was able to get out of bed and groggily walk around the house. The feeling of listlessness reminded me of my 2022 bout with COVID. Following that particular illness, I was able to regain my energy and my spirit only by making a conscious effort to get them back. I decided to take the same approach with my current infection.
I started by riding my stationary bike, but couldn’t pedal for more than ten minutes. It was barely better than doing nothing at all. Next I decided to clean myself up. I trimmed my beard and took a long, hot shower. I got out of my pajamas and put on jeans and a teeshirt. When I looked in the mirror and still saw an exhausted old man, I decided to get a haircut.
I drove to the Asian nail salon where Pa, my hair stylist, rents a room in the back. I was told by the nail people that Pa, a Laotian woman who’d spent the first five years of her life in a Thai refugee camp, had gone back to Thailand for a month. I could have taken this as a sign that I wasn’t supposed to get a haircut, but for the first time in my life, I felt compelled to get one. I jumped back in my car and drove to Great Clips. The woman who cut my hair gave me the “child/senior discount” without asking me if I qualified. Because I was sure I looked as old as I felt, I ignored the unintentional insult and made sure my tip more than made up for the reduced price.
Manyu comes back to Wisconsin at the end of the week. She’ll probably think I got a haircut for her.
* My wife was in Taiwan during last week’s big earthquake, and she is fine.
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