Getting a trim always makes my hair stand on end

Before I begin, let me confess straight out: I have always loathed getting my hair cut. Any excuse will do to put it off for just one more day. Maybe I’m getting a cold — I don’t want to infect the barber.

Maybe the barber has a cold — I don’t want to catch it.

And wouldn’t my time be better spent studying something … something useful like … hmmm … like the ancient Mayan calendar?

After all, if you’re not conversant with its interlocking cyclical systems — its Tzolkin, the Haab and Long Count — can you really say you’ve lived?

Even my earliest memories of getting my hair cut are steeped in aversion.

There I’d sit, perched on a plank between the armrests of the barbershop chair so the barber wouldn’t have to stand stooped as he worked on me. I’d look glumly in the mirror at the sullen mug staring back at me.

My head would get pulled this way and that, hair combed forward, backward, to one side, the other, and all the while the barber and my mother telling me to sit still.

As the climax of the ritual, the coup de grace, gobs of greasy hair cream would be slathered on my head and, at my mother’s direction, the barber would comb my hair and shape a little curl on my brow.

As another such curl owner, Charlie Brown, put it, “Good grief!”

In the many years since those days, I have come to terms with the necessity of periodically getting my hair cut.

And I do — though friends and colleagues might say not nearly often enough.

After long trial and error, I settled upon a hairstyle I felt comfortable with. Not too long, not too short, and combed straight back.

In the United States, I could walk into any barbershop anywhere, say not too long, not too short and combed straight back, and that’s what I’d get.

Then I moved to China, where new barbershop customs and rituals awaited.

In my first such visit, almost immediately upon entering the shop, I was pulled into a backroom, where my hair was washed. What the heck! I had just washed it an hour before.

A towel was wrapped around my head, I was led to a chair, and a menu was placed in my hands with a price list.

In answer, I began pantomiming scissors cutting my hair. The assistant pantomimed back that I had to choose a price, so, of course, I chose the cheapest.

I tried to pantomime not too long, not too short, combed straight back, but to no avail. Twenty minutes and another hair-washing plus blow-drying later, I stood back on the street sporting an unevenly long on top, much too short on the sides and a nick near my ear. Was it my parsimony, I wondered? In the eight years since, I’ve seen a steady succession of barbershop variations on that theme, the most memorable being the time I went on my wife’s advice to the high-end salon where she gets her hair done.

There, I got a cup of coffee, a cookie, and a carefully crafted, curious clump of hair — like a bone-mass lump on a prehistoric cranium — set askew on the right-forward side of my brow.

Getting my hair cut in China has introduced adventure into the experience, I must admit. Aside from the double wash and blow dry, you never know what’s going to happen.

But it hasn’t tempered my lifelong aversion to barbershops.

As I sit looking in the mirror, I still see that same sullen mug, now worn and wrinkled, glumly staring back at me.