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Bad Hair Day
by Cliff Prewett
Somewhere along the pot-holed path of pursuing pecuniary opportunities and personal pleasures a point is reached that's called maturity. (That one's easier if you read it out loud, wipe the saliva off your monitor, and then continue.)
Years ago I figured maturity had to be the point at which one's wants and one's needs miraculously become the same. Years later the definition seems to still hold. But the point of maturity never announces itself. You just wake up one morning and you're old.
Old, however, isn't what we all thought it was gonna be. Somehow, immersed in their efforts to make sure we actually survived to get to that point, our parents neglected to clue us in on a few facts.
*One: Nothing falls off. It only droops a little.
*Two: Everything still works just as it always did. A little slower maybe--but that brings up another thing. When you're old you have more time. So who cares.
*Three: And this is the only one that bothers me--a lot of us guys start to get too tall for our hair. While we're pondering that one we begin to notice certain other anomalies of depilation.
The hair which used to sprout on our head begins to find its way to our ears. Using tried and true TR (Texas Redneck) logic, I've always figured it simply loses its sense of direction. For years I never did anything about that though. Even if I could invent something to fix it I'd be embarrassed to ask an attorney to submit the patent application. Whatcha gonna call it? A Palm Pilot for Hair? I know Rand-McNally'll want a piece of that action. I guess loss of sense of direction is to be expected. I sure wouldn't wanna be exposed to what it went through with everything that's been dumped on my head for a few decades.
Yeah, you can always trim ears, but have you ever noticed it grows back faster'n a Delta shadetail during squirrel season? Problem is, you just can't cut it close enough. Cuttin' yourself shaving is one thing; but explaining how you cut a chunk out of your own ear is another. And you think they talk about you at the office now.
While helping a "mature" friend hook up a new TV a few years back, I discovered, quite by accident, what turned out to be a great interim solution for this fuzzy ear thing. While trying to find out why the TV didn't work, Earl stuck his ear up close to the screen and pushed the "On'" button. When I walked in and plugged in the power cord, I noticed that the hair in his ear waved at me twice, and then pointed straight at the TV screen. I had no idea he had so much of it. I always thought he was just a little hard of hearing.
When he turned to look at me over his shoulder it looked like two Hair-Tailed Bull Finches had collided head-on right in the middle of his brain. But wow! Think how close you could cut that hair with it sticking straight out that way. Funny how some of the world's greatest discoveries happen just like that.
"Aha," I said to myself, "this has implications."
But funny, too, how fast my "down home" ingenuity got squashed. The next morning my other half wanted to know why her little six inch TV was on my bathroom chest, and then she got real excited and acted kinda funny when I showed her--rubbing my ears against the tv and sprouting and wielding a razor with great dexterity.
She got real serious and wanted to sit down and talk about my creativeness. Used phrases like: "You know, Dallas is a cosmopolitan city and there are all kinds of people here." And "Not everybody can be expected to really understand Texas Redneck logic and, uh, gimmicks."
Well, she made me promise not to tell any of her friends' husbands about my nifty, hair-raising, cutting-edge discovery. I was disappointed, but decided to humor her. She's a Yankee, you know.
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BIO: Cliff Prewett, a resident of Dallas in his native Texas, will tell you simply that he is a life-long student of people of all colors, attitudes, lifestyles, and beliefs -- an endless quest that necessarily began with himself the week of his sixteenth birthday, one from which there is no chance of graduation.
On 5 January 1959, he had the good fortune to move, alone, into the small town of Cleveland in the central Mississippi Delta. He thought he was looking for a career in the broadcasting business having already been on the air for a year. What he found over the next two decades was the meaning of character.
Fighting proud of his Texas roots, he'll also tell you that if it takes a village to raise a child, the Mississippi Delta was his village, and that when they're missing an idiot they call him. [HIS words!]
NOTE: Sadly, we must report that USADS writer Cliff Prewett died in the spring of 2004.
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COMMENTS:
From: Jeanette Williams Davis of Greenwood, Ms.
Message: I love it!! It was my laugh for today!
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From: Bonnie Horton of C/land
Message: I enjoy your humorous columns very much. A little humor brightens the day. Thanks.
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From: Lisa Gibson of Lakewood, CO
Message: I laughed hysterically over this. Well, at least someone has found a solution to that pesky hair in your ears!
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