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Jenny cut my hair yesterday out on the balcony in the sun and she kept laughing as she did, which doesn't instill confidence to hear your haircutter laugh, but at least the hair stays out of my eyes and the worst part (she says) is in back, and we're in isolation so who cares, and at my age I'm not applying for a job, so it's rather immaterial.
If I wanted to do something wild with my hair, dye it deep purple with bright green stripes, now would be the time to do it, but I lack the motivation to be colorful. I'm a writer and an observer and you can't see the world clearly if other people are staring at you: it's see or be seen.
Hair was crucial in the 10th grade, 1958, when you had greasers like Trump and jocks with crewcuts and farmboys had shaggy hair and we cool guys aimed for an Ivy League look.
My dad cut his sons' hair and he was a carpenter and not so keen about fashion. I told him, "Short on top but with a part, a little longer in back."
Coolness was the point of it, blue button-down shirts, khaki pants, loafers, white socks, but now I have no clue about what's cool, if anything is, and coolness is no longer a factor in my life. I'm old. The first section of the paper I turn to is the obituary section. People I know keep showing up there.
I went away to the U aiming to be a writer so I majored in English, not knowing how much I'd come to hate it. I wanted to be F. Scott Fitzgerald and my teachers were his mortician.
The English Department was across the street from the Institute of Technology and we writers loved to look down on the engineers. They wore the wrong color shirts with plastic pocket protectors and high-water pants with belts hitched way up under their rib cage and half-rim horn-rimmed glasses and short nerdy hair whereas we had long majestic hair and we wrote dark incomprehensible poetry.
If I ever felt miserable about having to write a paper about Dryden or Coleridge or Milton, I just crossed the street and mingled with engineers, their slide rules in a holster on their belt, a race of dullards without a single amazing and original thought, and it gave me the arrogance I was looking for.
I think of this now as I consider what engineers have given the world, such as this little gizmo the size of half a sandwich that is always near me, a telephone that is also a camera, encyclopedia, newspaper, calendar, compass, weather monitor, phone book, and twenty other things I'm not aware of.
Quiet studious men from the world of numbers changed the world in some wonderful ways. Bill Gates does not appear to spend a great deal of time worrying about his hair.
Mark Zuckerberg has hair like a skullcap. Facebook is my link to family and friends. The nerds who invented Google gave a great gift us old people who forgot what "postmodern" means and can't remember the year Rod Carew set a record for stealing home base and Google will find it for you: he stole home seventeen times. Seven times in 1969 alone.
Nineteen sixty-nine was an enormous year in my life. I was 27 and had a baby boy and needed to get serious and instead of finishing a novel that nobody would want, I got a job in radio doing the early morning shift and I shifted from tragic self-awareness to humor because that's what people needed on a dark winter morning and that was when I started to feel useful and that's when you find your vocation. And hair has nothing to do with it.
I write this on a laptop hooked up to a printer with an instruction manual written by engineers for other engineers, people who whizzed through college courses that to me were a solid brick wall, so it's unreadable for me. Imagine if all your cookbooks were in French and you had to call one of your few Francophones in order to make pancakes. But never mind. Thank you, Nerdland, for the laptop and the phone.
I could live without them but it wouldn't be nearly so much fun. I apologize for looking down on you for your bad hair.
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Garrison Keillor is an author and radio personality.