People training to survive in the wilderness are taught to stay calm, find water and food, focus on the present, keep clean, and brush their teeth. Somehow the emphasis on tooth brushing appeals to me, and now I wonder if sanity in this time of unprecedented governmental dysfunction might require some attention to oneโs personal appearance.
This possibility, as well as a mysterious change atop my head, leads me, not for the first time, to consider my hair.
Hair came to Broadway not long after I began teaching in the 1960s. The musicalโs long hair and countercultural values undoubtedly influenced me.
But I had pretty serious hair thoughts back in the 1950s, when the โducktailsโ my friends back in Portland, Ore., called a โHollywood haircutโ began to speak to me. My parents werenโt sure ducktails would work at our house, but my mother agreed to join a discussion of this possibility with our local barber, Art Fretwell.
Art, a serious, soft-spoken man, gave no hint of amusement or surprise when we raised the Hollywood haircut question. There would need to be a few transitional weeks, he explained, allowing my hair in back and on the sides to grow long enough to form a respectable ducktail.
While he was explaining this, a disheveled looking boy with hair sprouting over his ears walked by the shop. Art nodded in his direction, saying gently Iโd need to look pretty much like that for a while.
Simply and quietly, Art Fretwell resolved this first hair crisis. I resisted the Hollywood style.
Just a few years later, Marilyn, my first girlfriend in high school, told me her older sister believed I might grow more handsome once I began to gray at the temples.
I should have seen another sort of crisis coming.
Marilyn soon dropped me for a somewhat older guy, who might already have been more handsome although not yet gray.
As I matured, my hair thoughts turned to beards. My first beard crisis came well into my sophomore year in college, when Iโd stopped shaving for a few weeks. In line for breakfast one morning, a woman Iโd never met before offered to let me use some of her eye shadow to fill in the blank spots. She seemed earnest, and I shaved before I went to class that morning.
By the time I was teaching and influenced by the 1960s Broadway musical, Nancy Shea Nichols had begun cutting my hair. She had scissors and a measure of spousal authority, and she preferred a trim style that would not have kept me out of the Marines. So I elected to use a summer vacation for trying the beard again.
This time the beard filled in satisfactorily, but I had billed it as a summer experiment so it had to come off in the fall.
It was another nine months before I could negotiate a return engagement for the facial hair. It reappeared and has followed me โ perhaps even led โ into my 80s.
There were several years of bearded bliss before the facial hair began to show what seemed to me premature signs of aging โ patches of white in an otherwise very dark beard. (No signs yet, incidentally, of gray at the temples.)
Iโd begun to assume administrative responsibilities at Denison University, a status that can lead to nicknames. In the years before the white patches appeared, I was sometimes called โDean of Dissent,โ which I took as a compliment.
As my Denison deaning responsibilities increased, the white beard patches arrived, and my nickname in the college hallways became โBadger.โ
This, it seemed to me, was not a grassroots accolade.
It arrived at about the same time I finally began to grow the chest hair Iโd longed for since boyhood. But most of this hair was white, almost invisible. These changes surely had something to do with my decision to return to full-time teaching.
Now in full-time retirement, I arrive at the recent, mysterious change atop my head.
This is not just a matter of hair loss although that could be a factor. And itโs not simply a matter of โbed hair.โ No, when I have been reading or writing, my hair seems to reach for the sky. It looks as though Iโve piled up a mound of hair that could become a prodigious man bun โ or maybe as though I am striving to achieve a Lyle Lovett hairstyle. Even my patient applications of wet washcloths to the top of my head are slow to bring it down.
I am an admirer of Lyle Lovettโs music. In family gatherings we have been known to sing his songs If I Had a Boat and Farther Down the Line. His marriage to actress Julia Roberts seems to me a sign that women are drawn, at least briefly, to such a hairstyle.
It has occurred to me that my inadvertent Lyle Lovett look could also be a sign: Maybe I should run for president.
Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.