Hair today, gone tomorrow

I’ve lost the ponytail.

This should come as a surprise to no one. I’ve been losing hair for years, if not decades. But to have a whole fistful of it disappear onto the floor at once? That’s drastic.

Friends and former co-workers who haven’t seen me for a couple of years may be surprised that I ever had one. It was a late-life (as opposed to mid-life) fling, an “I’m-going-to-retire-now-and-let-my-hair-down” decision. For all of my working life, I was a clean-cut kind of guy. Only when I saw a change coming did I go into Beach Boys mode.

Dutch Boy

Dutch Boy paint has been around for a long time, but his hair stayed baby blond. (Dutch Boy paint website.)

It wasn’t always like that. I wore it shoulder-length, Dutch Boy style, complete with natural yellow waves and curls, for years — about three years, to be exact. Then my father tired of hearing about his cute little girl. My mother took me down to Louis Barber Shop in Hackensack, N.J. (Louis is gone now but his shop lives on!)

I went in looking like a miss and came out looking like a Marine.

My style went a little shaggy in college, too. I’d usually go for a term — about three months — without a haircut. The one barber in our small college town had scalped me badly in my freshman year and I never set foot in his shop again.

Bright yellow turned dirty-blond in elementary school, brown in high school, dark chestnut in adulthood and pewter as seniority crept in. (The first gray hairs came along when our daughter was born, although I’m sure it was a coincidence.) When a routine haircut revealed more scalp than style, I decided it was time to Do Something.

But what?

When in doubt, grow it out

My serious widow’s peak had been creeping higher on my scalp for years, even as the hair in back was pushing downward. It was as if my entire scalp was trying to retreat down my collar. I gave up trying to forestall the inevitable. Eventually I surrendered and let it grow out, figuring that anyone who stared at the sides and back of my head wasn’t looking at the front and top.

Apparently I was wrong.

When my wife and I walked into a trendy, upscale styling salon for women and men in Burlington, Vermont, a cluster of artists — that’s the term they use there — behind the receptionist suppressed smiles. They shared knowing glances as I tugged the tie out of the ‘tail. Soon one emerged from the back room and escorted me to her station. She listened carefully as I explained what I was trying to do.

She lathered my head with an Australian brand “wash” and conditioned it with the same “rinse” — that’s Aussie for shampoo and conditioner, respectively — and took me back to her chair. Then, after a few tentative snips, she paused.

An artistic dilemma

“I have another idea,” she said, and explained that when people see the hair pulled back over thinning hair and falling down to the shoulders, they know exactly what is going on. “Let me work with what you’ve got,” she said.

“You’re the artist,” I answered. Closing my eyes, I let her go to work on the canvas, or glob of clay, or hunk of granite that is my head.

A half-hour later, we were done, and I looked more like a businessman than a beach bum. “And if you don’t like it, or if you want something warmer on the back of your neck for winter, you could always grow it out again.”

Probably not, though. If I want something warmer for winter, I’ll take my Beach Boys moment in Florida.

The last hurrah of the ponytail.

Catching the breeze

Writer-sailors get their pre-sail orientation. Instructor Kelly Hedglin Bowen is on the left. That’s me on the right.

I stopped in mid-sentence. “My writing is terrible,” I said, shaking my head and squinting at the page.

Sitting next to me in the Sonar, Alex nudged my leg and urged me to go on. You’re not supposed to say such things in a Gateless writing session. It was all about overcoming your inner editor, bringing yourself to put words to paper and share them, regardless of your self-censor and of what you think (or fear) others might say.

That’s Alex, sitting aft, and me, forward, from the viewpoint of skipper Kelly Hedglin Bowen, who took the photo.

One of the things I learned in this session is that others might read a lot more meaning into your words than you intended. My inner editor realized only later that the problem here was a matter of poor word choice.

In this case, though, the words were true: My writing was terrible. My handwriting, my scrawl. I couldn’t read my own words, and this was a problem because the setting in a lively boat on a busy waterfront had inspired me to use different vocabulary and rhythms than I usually do. It was literally like reading a stranger’s words and penmanship.

But I pressed on despite that stranger and finished the piece. It wasn’t so bad after all. My fellow travelers said they liked it, anyway.

And so we continued, in turn, as we sailed across the lake and out toward Rock Dunder, thinking about origin stories and writing prompts and sharing.

Kelly Hedglin Bowen, a rare and probably unique combination of certified Gateless method trainer and sailing instructor, piloted the boat through the waters and its crew through their writing exercises, handling both with care and ease.

And they’re off on a sailing-writing adventure! Photos by Barbara Hampton

She offers several Wind∼Word writing/sailing sessions each summer through the Community Sailing Center in Burlington, Vermont. More information, including dates, is available on its website.

For me, it was a perfect end of a summer that had seen no time on the water and little pushing a pencil. I hope that next season I’ll be under the canvas more often, but I think I’ll enjoy the moment more if I leave the paper-pushing ashore.

I was right. My ~~writing~~ penmanship is terrible. I’ll stick to the keyboards I’ve been using for some 40 years now.

RSVP! It’s an emergency!

Although we’ve met on occasion in my former life as a newspaper editor, Waterbury (Connecticut) Mayor Neil M. O’Leary wouldn’t be able to recognize me in a crowd (I’ve tested this). The city’s police chief, Fernando Spagnolo, would know me by name only, if that. (I don’t think they have a mug shot of me hanging on the wall.)

Yet when the two of them want to invite my wife and me to a party, it’s not only a big deal. It’s an emergency.

It said so right on the robocall we got this week: “Stand by for an emergency notification from CT-Alert.” They wanted us to come to the National Night Out, complete with face painting and balloon art.

Like just about everyone else in the world, we both carry smartphones these days. We’ve had the same numbers for years — back to when AT&T, then just about the only wireless game in town, issued them for the Waterbury area.

Over the years, we both signed up for emergency alert services both in Connecticut and in Vermont, where we have a summer place. Both states offer people the chance to subscribe to notifications about emergencies such as criminal activity, natural disasters, winter storms, fires, major accidents, power failures, water main breaks and the like using SMS text messaging or automated robocalls to cellphones, landlines and other media.

These alerts can truly be life-savers. Over the years, we’ve used them to shelter from hurricanes and winter storms (which are all too common) and from tornadoes (less so, but too close to home). In doing so, we added the incoming SMS and toll-free numbers for both state’s services to our contacts.

That’s how we learned that both states appear to use the same emergency alert service. One day up in Vermont we received messages from what our contacts list identified as that state’s alert service that Mayor O’Leary and Chief Spagnolo were advising people that a water main break had closed, as I recall, Cherry Street in Waterbury.

I marveled at the coincidence. Not only did each state have a Waterbury, but both the big city and its tiny namesake had a Mayor O’Leary, a Chief Spagnolo and a Cherry Street!

Vermont’s Waterbury, population 5,064, has had to issue boil-water notices for the occasional water problem, but it doesn’t have a mayor or, as of last year, a police department. It is run by a select board (still known in Connecticut as the board of selectmen) and covered by two resident state police troopers. As far as I can tell, its only Cherry is Cherry Garcia at the Ben and Jerry’s tour.

No matter. Such emergency alerts are few and far between, especially if you sign up for only a few towns, such as where you live and work. In Connecticut, we had registered years ago for alerts from our home town of Southbury and from Middlebury, where we attend church, and Waterbury, where I worked for 35 years.

Then, on July 17, coincidentally the day of the city’s Republican nominating convention and the day before the Democrats nominated O’Leary to run again, we got another one.

O’Leary and Spagnolo sent out an invitation to an open house to improve police community relations. An important program, to be sure; we need more community-building projects like that one, and like the National Night Out event we received notice of most recently. I’m all for them.

But is it really an emergency?

Both the mayor’s office and the police department are highly media-savvy: print, radio, grassroots organizations, websites, Facebook, Twitter, and the like. Even text messages would be appropriate, if the recipient were given the opportunity to opt into such social invitations.

Somehow, though, using an emergency alert system to invite people to a citywide community event seems an abuse of the medium. It might even backfire and lead people to ignore these text messages and robocalls. That could endanger public safety.

So, Mr. Mayor, if you really want to invite me to a party (seriously?), don’t robocall. Don’t text. I’d rather read about it in the paper.

Howard Fielding is a retired editor and columnist for the Republican-American.

The Birds and the Bees

Here we are in North Hero, Vermont, getting to know our new environment. Or, more specifically, as you’ll see from these pictures, here we aren’t. Not a soul to be seen on the deck.

We chose this place, in part, because of the quiet, the back-to-nature feeling, and especially because of the sunsets, such as this one. We love the deck and the two screened porches, one adjacent to the deck, in the west, and one off the kitchen, in the east.

Apparently, we are not alone in our enthusiasm.

We noticed, on our first tours of the house, the bird nests. “That’s great!” said I. “We love the birds.” I was a little concerned about the nest directly over the door to the deck, and the one over the main entrance door, but I figured it was off-season and the occupants, like many other seasonal residents, had flown south for the winter. They wouldn’t be back in the spring, or they’d find another place.

When we were up here in April, I scrubbed down the poop deck and the entrance alcove, and tried to dislodge the muddy nests (unsuccessfully). It was still early in the season, so no one was home at the time.

Now we’re here at the end of May, and the barn swallows — for that is what they are — apparently come back for the holiday weekends, too. There are families in both nests over the deck and the entrance hall, and probably others as well that we haven’t discovered yet. I’d watch from the west porch, but that seems to be attracting yellow jackets. We suspect a nearby nest, perhaps in the crawl space under the porch. So the birds and the bees (metaphorically, as I know these are wasps) have been teaching us a thing or two.

Here’s another view of the barn swallows, closer to home.

Sunrise

Actually, this is a winter sunset, looking west over a frozen Lake Champlain. But this place, near Sunset View Road, is also great for sunrises. This is a sunrise to a new career of independent writing. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we will enjoy relaxing with the view from the deck.

Write in the Middle

… of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness

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