Me And The Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Haircut

     I've never been hungry or in want of anything, I have  a family, a home, a car I can drive anywhere I feel like going, I have a piano, a laptop, a cat, good healthcare,  and probably a hundred times more stuff and reasons than I really need to make a human being happy on this planet, and all of the above isn't even the tip of the iceberg of blessings I should be counting every minute.
    But none of that was any consolation last Thursday when I acquired an awful haircut.  I mean, it was just awful! 
    I walked into the same no-appointment-necessary  chain hair chain salon that I always go to and this is how I looked when I walked out:

      I'm not kidding you.  That was the only way it would lay.

And look at the side: shaved straight across with a shadowy little side-burn.  Who the heck cuts a woman's hair straight across with a sideburn?!

    By the time the stylist had finished I knew I'd been hit with a bad haircut, but I didn't realize how  bad until I got into my car, glanced into the rear view mirror and saw the triangular side burn below each ear.  I came down with an immediate and severe case of the Bad Haircut Blues.
    I needed to go to the grocery store but was too embarrassed about my hair so I didn't go.  I had to pep-talk myself into leaving my house to teach the one more piano student I had that day.
    The next morning I woke up hoping my hair would look better but it didn't.  Those sideburns were still there. 
    I returned to the hair salon, to what end I couldn't really say except that I was upset and wanted somebody to know it.  When I pointed out to the stylist the shaved side burns she'd inflicted on me she looked wounded.
    "But you asked me to cut your hair that way, remember?"
    "I did ?"  I asked.
    "Yeah.  When I asked you whether you wanted me to leave your sides at the natural angle they grow at or cut them across in a straight line above your ear you said 'straight line', remember?"
    In fact that was not how I recalled the conversation going down.   I did recall her asking me at some point the cryptic question "Do you want the sides straight or curved?"
    To which I replied, "Um, I don't know...straight?", thinking straight as in straight down and curved as in somehow curved out.  Then I went back to the newspaper I had my nose buried while she finished cutting my hair. 
     Anyway, the young stylist seemed truly sorry that I didn't like what I'd asked for and offered to shave off the little hairs growing to a point below each ear, but I declined and returned home in a heavy funk. 
    What is it about the appearance of our hair that can weigh so heavy upon us? 
    I tried talking myself out of my bad hair funk,  telling my self it didn't look that bad, that the shaved sections would grow back, reminding myself of what a cushy existence I have and that with all the suffering in the world I should be ashamed of myself, not to mention that at 62 I was 'way too old to be funking over my hair.
    And though everything I was telling myself was true I still couldn't stop funking. 
    Until, like the snapping on of a light bulb to disperse the darkness in my soul (oooo, forgive that fruity metaphor!) , I remembered Jerry's.
    Any of you who read my Camino blog about Tom's and my 490-mile trek across the mountains of Spain last year ( "Tighten Your Boots", is that blog's name, or it can be found at pattiliszkay.weebly.com in case anybody's interested) might remember my post on Jerry's, the barber shop I went to for a short, short guy-cut before my trip:

     And the guy-cut I got there:

        Anyway, what this light in my brain made me see was that it was time to return to Jerry's for another guy-cut.  I knew nothing that nothing but time could bring back the shaved-off parts of my hair, but I hoped another really short guy-cut might at least camoflage the situation a little bit.
        Now, the last time I went to Jerry's I learned that Jerry was actually a pretty blonde lady named Jenny, the barber/stylist who gave me my original guy-cut.
        But this time Jenny was busy with another customer and the only available barber was a big,  friendly muscular guy in a cut-off tee-shirt named Kurt whose arms were in covered in tattoos. 
    Kurt said he felt too nervous to cut my hair because he was only a barber, not a barber/stylist like Jenny and he'd never cut a woman's hair before except his grandma's, and hers only one time.
    I told him not to be nervous, to just  pretend that I was a guy and do his stuff. 
    When I showed him my sideburns he said, "Ewww, you can't cut a woman's hair like that.  Women's hair grows differently on the side than men's".
    Ewww, indeed.   For somebody who'd only cut his grandma's hair once, Kurt definitely had a clue about women's hair.
    I told him that no matter what how he cut my hair it couldn't end up any worse than it was. I told him that if he just could just camoflage the shaved sides a little I'd be very grateful.
    He did and I was.

        So grateful was I, in fact, that I left a $10 tip on the $13 haircut.  For which Kurt was grateful.
        So the story ended up with much gratitude, which is a good way for any story to end, right?