Cutting the wild hair

“Reopening is more difficult than the close-down. The close-down … was a blunt operation.”—New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, proceeding more cautiously toward re-normalizing than certain other jurisdictions.

My weekly podcast partner asked Monday which of the emerging normalcy-revisiting options I intended to engage in first.

Would it be a haircut, in-restaurant dining, a gym workout or a tattoo?

It was not a hard question. It was in that order, as he knew, and you probably could guess.

The haircut comes right away, with the restaurant outing in a month or so if there are no spikes in infections.

For weight work I will put a household beagle under each arm and say, “get that rabbit,” meaning the one venturing into this yard occasionally, then try to keep the frantic baying rascals from squirming loose. Get a couple of beagles and try it.

For further exercise, I have been hitting tennis balls all this while, two or three times a week. I like to rally with groundstrokes for 10 minutes, then tell mostly true stories for 20.

The baseline-to-baseline configuration is social distancing-plus. Some people worry about touching the tennis balls. Perhaps I should but do not, so long as I know the other guy.

A tattoo will achieve consideration last. I am not sure what, if anything, I want to express on my skin forever. These columns last long enough. As the late sports-writing great Jim Bailey once mentored: “A columnist depends on the reader’s short memory.”

Why a tattoo gets re-permitted in Arkansas a week before a cavity filling is allowed … there is an explanation, I am sure, and it probably makes sense. But it also makes for a good one-liner. It would advance the national stereotype of a toothless tattooed Arkie, if anyone much cared, and no one much does.

As for the haircut, I was down for my regular three-week trim in mid-March. A three-week cycle is best for a combover designed to disguise a hairline receded to the crown.

A man told me about a decade ago that my forehead was a “five-head.” I now give it a six or seven. The governor knows what I mean.

But my barber, a one-man operator, called the day before that appointment and said he had been shut down. He said I could cut my hair myself or sit for Shalah’s attempt, but that I should know his “disaster fee” was triple the usual.

I did not cut this hair, nor did Shalah. But I will take extra money to the appointment today, the first day of reopened barbering. The disaster appears to have happened naturally.

My coiffure is Trump in a windstorm.

I have kept it all ball-capped much of the time, particularly during weekly Facebook Live telecasts of my “Behind the Headlines” class for the LifeQuest program of lifelong learning.

For that occasion, I have worn a Yale cap given to me by a friend whose daughter has a Ph.D. from there.

I consider it ironic for a UCA dropout to lead a class of refined and well-educated retiree listeners. The Ivy League logo expands the contradiction.

I expected a formal complaint from New Haven but received none.

Restaurant dining will come pending a little home practice in ramming a knife and fork through a mask without stabbing my tongue.

All of that is to say that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, of the mildly poetic seeming candor, put it best as usual on Monday.

He was talking about going slower than some states on phasing in an economic reopening. He was saying his daughters give him grief for saying “I don’t know” frequently in his briefings. But he said we don’t know what we don’t know, and that not knowing is a driver of smart policy.

For his part in Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson barrels ahead with redstate sensibility—covered by health director Nate Smith’s understated data spin—through barber shops and gyms and tattoo parlors and indoor performance halls and soon to movie theaters.

We may see an isolated hot spot, but we’re ready to act quickly, the governor said.

How one acts quickly on an infection from which symptoms often don’t arise for days … well, we must start back sometime. You can’t borrow trillions forever. Unless you can.

Only a “resurgence” in infections would influence him to retreat, Hutchinson said.

And what would qualify as resurgence? Asa deftly deferred to Smith, as is his frequent wont. And Smith said that a notable spike clearly beyond an aberration and traceable to any of the newly opened activities would lead to a re-shuttering of those activities, but only those.

Let us hope there is no resurgence anywhere. Let us hope that what we don’t yet know is that we’re smart enough and responsible enough to begin to restart our lives and evade the virus at the same time.

Let us hope for dexterous masked barbers managing with gloves to trim deftly around the elastic ear loops and behind-the-head cloth ties of the raging facial fashion of 2020.

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