Let me just start by saying that I don’t begrudge my wife her concerns about aging — I mean, what woman in our culture doesn’t worry about the inevitable effects of getting older? The problem is that since my wife actually looks about 10 years younger than she is, she’s forced to focus her concern about aging on what the process is doing to my looks.
Most often, the scrutiny takes place while I’m expounding on some burning issue of the day, such as the lack of quality tackling among NFL cornerbacks, when suddenly her loving gaze is transformed into a frown — the kind doctors get when they’re looking over a terminal patient’s test results. Then, before I even get to my point about the stupidity of the “prevent” defense, she’ll cut me off, saying, “we really need to do something about those eyebrows.”
The sad fact is that about 10 years ago, a few of my individual eyebrow hairs decided to abandon the short and unobtrusive look in favor of the long, unkempt appearance you find in the eyebrows of many grumpy old men. Many more of my eyebrow hairs soon followed suit, at which point my wife decided that before the creeping eyebrow tendrils began obscuring my vision, she’d better start tweezing out the worst offenders. At first I tried to object to this painful procedure, but she always brought me to heel quickly with a pseudo-apologetic, “Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you wanted to look like Andy Rooney.”
To avoid being subjected to such a blatant act of “manscaping,” I could try disappearing into a secret part of the house where I can’t be found, just like the cats do whenever they hear anyone whisper the words “veterinarian,” “shots” or “friends coming over with their toddler.” But I think I’m just accustomed to letting the women in my life handle my most pressing grooming needs.
This dates back to childhood, when my budget-conscious mother used to avoid the expense of a barber by cutting my hair herself. Mom was not a licensed cosmetologist, mind you, but she did have all the necessary qualifications for cutting my hair, by which I mean she was bigger than me and she owned a pair of scissors.
Her unique approach involved sitting me down on the kitchen table and putting what seemed like each individual hair up in a bobby pin until my head looked like the result of some failed experiment involving a human child, a troll doll and an explosion at the paper clip factory. This desired effect achieved, she would begin painstakingly removing the bobby pins one by one, clipping as she went.
If this sounds laborious, it was. Still, you can’t argue with results. Despite the fact that she had no formal training — and that each haircut took longer than Lindbergh needed to cross the Atlantic — Mom was nevertheless able to create a hairstyle that was wholly indistinguishable from a “bowl cut.”
The other thing that always struck me about my mother’s haircutting efforts was that though a great number of hairs got lopped off — I know because most of them wound up in my eyes and mouth — my hair never seemed much shorter afterward. Not that I didn’t receive compliments. Whenever she and I went out in public, strangers regularly stopped us to comment on what a “pretty little girl” my mother had.
So today, to avoid sporting the eyebrows of a man twice my age, I’m required to regularly undergo a painful and decidedly unmanly tweezing ritual. Now I think I understand why Andy Rooney is so grumpy all the time.
Examiner columnist Malcolm Fleschner just knows that any day now his wife is going to start noticing stray ear hairs as well.
