Bad Hair Day
OK, I admit it; I’m frugal. If there’s a way to save a buck on a project around the house, I’ll do it as long as it doesn’t involve electricity. I don’t get along well with small explosions. But maybe, just maybe, there should be a law prohibiting inexperienced dads from giving their children haircuts.

Back in the days when Oscar used to be a tough customer at the barbershop, few barbers dared to cut his hair a second time. He employed such tactics as shaking his head vigorously from side to side, grabbing the barber’s clippers and sliding out of the chair. He even kicked one poor guy in the old testaments. We definitely never went back there.

One fine afternoon, I declared that he needed a haircut. Against Fina’s protests, I proclaimed my splendid self to be capable of giving him as nice a trim as any barber. To support this affirmation, I directed her attention to the box containing my new deluxe styling clippers. Right there in bold red was the manufacturer’s exclamatory decree: “CUT HAIR LIKE A PRO!”

Fina was unimpressed. She tends to take a suspicious approach toward any statement that appears under a blaring “AS SEEN ON TV” icon.

Ignoring her skepticism, I situated Oscar in a lawn chair in our back yard, plugged in the clippers and began my grand symphony. Although I expected him to squirm some, I felt I could effortlessly resonate with the cosmic undulations of his universe. Birds would swoop by mimicking every deft sweep of my clippers. Way up in our towering red maple tree, my chattering squirrel friends would approvingly do lazy barrel rolls from limb to limb. They would all marvel at how I rivaled their own graceful skills so readily. This was going to be The Haircut of Haircuts, and I would be known near and far as the man who can trim on a whim.

Back on Earth, he was like a bucking bronco at a rodeo. The clippers went zinging across his scalp like a flat stone skipping across a pond. By the time I had finished mutilating his head, he had a cluster of bald patches on his scalp that resembled crop circles made by a drunken UFO pilot.

To give you an idea of how bad it was, you must realize that Oscar has a very thick head of hair. A barber can give him a buzz cut like raw recruits get when entering the military and you still can’t see his scalp.

Fina seemed furious for some reason. “Are you happy now, Mister “CUT HAIR LIKE A PRO?” I told you, but you knew better. Not even a barber can fix this disaster!”

I tried to play down the botch job noting that his hair would grow back in no time. She threatened to throw the clippers out, but I pled with her that I needed them to groom the dog. We had an Airedale whom the kids named Jaco (pronounced “Jocko”), an acronym created from the first letter of each of their first names: Jake, Alex, Conrad and Oscar. She didn’t buy into the dog story, but I did promise to never again touch Oscar’s head with anything sharper than a sponge.

During that time, Oscar traveled to and from school on a regular school bus. Usually, Fina would put him on the bus in the mornings, and I would take him off in the afternoons. Because of his appearance, Fina kept him home for a few days out of embarrassment. But he had to return to school eventually, and that’s when reality slapped me upside my own nicely groomed head.

That afternoon, I met the bus as usual. Because of his disabilities, the law requires an aide to be on the bus in addition to the driver. As he was stepping down, the aide asked me how his tests went. I was puzzled by her question and asked her what tests she was referring to. She said, “His brain tests; I noticed the spots where they shaved him to put the electrodes on.”

I tried to remain expressionless, but the first chink in my poker-faced armor was when my ears started turning red. She spotted the color change and instantly knew what actually had happened because of that inherent female truth-sensing-mystery-detection thing. She blurted an involuntary “uh oh,” telling me that she now knew the real story. That caused the rest of my face to match my ears’ tint and my entire head morphed into a giant tomato. Now she knew that I knew that she knew.

Fortunately for both of us, the bus driver had a schedule to keep, but for the next week I avoided eye contact with the aide while exchanging pleasantries. Eventually, things got back to normal, including regular visits to new unsuspecting barbers.