Everyone has their own birthday rituals. Some women take spa days, some wine collectors drink a special bottle from their cellars, some people sit and wallow in self-pity. I know a guy who is severely lactose intolerant, and once a year on his birthday, he indulges in a few pints of premium ice cream and then has the courtesy to sequester himself in privacy for a few hours as the effects take place. It’s a small price to pay, he says, for a once-a-year treat.
Me, I get a haircut. Wherever I am, I find a barber and get a trim, whether I need it or not. One year, I was in Istanbul and got the best haircut of my life. Once I was in Boston and spent an hour in the barber’s chair with scissors snipping and razors buzzing but left with no discernible change to my hair at all. I left a Manhattan barber shop in the East Village looking like a chrysanthemum. And I will never forget the birthday when I realized that I was old enough to need my eyebrows trimmed.
Recommended Stories
I travel a lot, especially in June, my birthday month, which intensifies the risk. To walk into a barbershop in a city where you don’t speak the language, settle into the chair, and gesture vaguely at your own head — Have at it! — is to surrender control to a stranger holding sharp instruments very close to your face. You don’t know his work. He doesn’t know your hair. You don’t even know how serious they are in that establishment about hand-washing and barbicide. In Delhi, many decades ago, I knew exactly how serious they were about both, because I was sitting in a wooden chair by the side of the road. There was no barber’s license or jar of blue disinfectant visible, but I took my chances anyway, and it turned out OK. On a scale of one to the chrysanthemum, it was a five.
But what can you do? That’s part of the fun: somewhere in the negotiation between what you’re trying to say — Just a little trim — and what he thinks you mean — Make me look like Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan — lies the adventure of life. Also, a haircut is the one alteration you can make to yourself that’s both completely reversible and, for a few weeks anyway, completely committing. It’s sort of a metaphor for life: We’re here, and it’s sometimes embarrassing, but then it’s not.
And when the haircut goes right — when you walk out into a foreign street feeling trimmed and tidy and a little bit improved — there’s something genuinely wonderful about it. You’re starting a new year on earth slightly spruced up, neatened at the edges, the loose ends quite literally snipped away. It’s a modest renovation, but a renovation is a renovation. You feel, for a morning at least, like a better-maintained version of yourself.
This year on my birthday, I was stuck on a train for most of the day, traveling from London to Amsterdam, so my traditional birthday haircut was the following morning, one day late. I’m not superstitious about the exact date — on or around will do — but I did wake up that morning with a purposeful attitude. Got to get a haircut today, I said to myself.
IT’S TIME TO DRESS FOR DINNER AGAIN
This is the pleasure of a small tradition, I think. The large ones — the holidays, the anniversaries, the milestone numbers — carry too much emotional freight. They come with expectations and obligations and the looming possibility of disappointment. But a small, private ritual, observed for no reason except that you’ve always observed it, asks nothing of you and gives back a quiet sense of continuity. The composer Gustav Mahler is supposed to have said that tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. A birthday haircut is a very small fire. But it’s mine, and I keep it lit, one trim at a time, wherever in the world I happen to be standing when the day comes around.
Good haircut in Amsterdam, by the way. I look sharp.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
