For Wilshire Baptist Church
I’ve been having bad hair days lately. It’s been seven weeks since my last haircut, and if I go too much longer it may be the longest I’ve gone without a haircut since I was a preschooler and finally got to grow out my parent-prescribed buzz cut. And that was during a summer stay with my grandparents, when I watched in the mirror as Grandma drew a line on my scalp with her comb and parted my hair for the first time with the help of Vitalis.
I know I’m not alone with bad hair during this time of Coronavirus, but actually, I’ve been having a bad hair year. Sometime around 18 months ago, the texture of my hair completely changed. It went from straight and limp to straight and spiky. I don’t know what caused the change. My stylist suggested it’s the gray hair, but I had gray hair long before this change. Whatever the cause, there doesn’t seem to be a good solution. I’ve tried having it cut long and having it cut short, and either way it stands straight up off my scalp. To prevent a perpetual look of pillow hair, I’ve had to resort to “product” — no, not Vitalis this time — and even then the glue doesn’t always work. I’m tempted to go back to the buzz cut of my four-year-old self.
I’m talking about my hair, but I’m also talking about this time we’re living in. This season of pandemic has put our haircuts on hold, but it also has shone a harsh light on other issues that, like my spiky hair, have been plaguing our communities for much longer. Some of these things we’ve known about but have been slow to address, and some have been hidden from sight until now. In random order:
- Haphazard hygiene
- Poor nutrition
- Once-size-fits-all education
- Over-crowding in public places
- Web and telecom networks that can’t handle the demand of everyone at once
- Under-equipped health care resources and infrastructure
- Cavalier attitudes about annual flu mortality and other “routine” causes of injury and death
- Investing in real friendships and not just on-line followers
- Paying lip service to living within our means
- Shaggy, unkempt lifestyles and social systems
- Slowing down and taking time to care for each other
That’s a partial list; you probably have other things that come to mind. The point is we can do better at so many things. We can get our private and public houses in order. We can care more, or at least care enough to work for change. I can’t fix the big societal issues, but I can support the people who have solutions. I can be more serious and intentional about friendships. I can show more appreciation for the people who do the little things that I take for granted — like the woman who cuts my hair.
Last week my brother got rid of his pandemic shag by letting his adult son cut it with electric clippers. He did it on Facebook Live because he’s a western musician and that’s the sort of thing he does. It reminded me of summer 1979 when I cut his hair with dull scissors in the bunkhouse of a New Mexico ranch. It was his birthday, he wanted it, and he was a good sport about the bad results. It helped that he wears a hat and he had an odd appreciation for rough cowboy cuts from the late 1800s. He is more discriminating about his looks now and wouldn’t put up with that amateur nonsense today. Neither would I, and so without electric clippers I’ll wait until my stylist is back in her shop.
Meanwhile, I’m going to use this shaggy downtime to work on that list of things I’ve been putting off.