Photo by Phyllis Stokes
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, joins the keeper and Phyllis as they discuss “hair,” the occasion being Phyllis’s “perm” that makes her look like a high school girl.
Hair is one of those life-long issues that leans heavily on a genetic base and the vagaries of “dumb luck.” The keeper’s father went bald in his 30’s, and his brother Orville lost most of his hair at an early age while the keeper retains a reasonable hair cover to this day. Orv has mentioned the unfairness of it all but does not seem to dwell on it.
Relationships with barbers and beauticians are cultivated with the intensity of courtships and is a life-long subject of conversation whenever two of more people get together in an elevator or a checkout line.
One of the keeper’s great granddaughters—Sophia, just “got her own chair” in the beauty business. Cheering about that will help the keeper forget the misery of his early haircuts when his father used hand powered clippers to cut and “pull” out his early curls, one of which his mother saved as part of his “baby book.”
The keeper would find that blond curl and show it to Phyllis but he thinks he might have already done that in earlier hair talk. Maybe more than once.
