Friday, September 19, 2008

Comb over

A fan would come on in the middle of the night that I could hear through the heating and cooling ducts. It would start out slow and then gain in rotation,.. d. d. d. d. d. d. d.d.d.dddd.... and then air would start to come out of the vent with a whosh. It was calming as I tried to sleep. It would come on and go off throughout the night.

The guest room in their house was comfortable but left me with a somewhat of an empty feeling. At least one of the kids didn't get kicked out of their room so I could sleep in a bed, I thought,.. I'd hate to look them in the face at breakfast knowing that I had kicked them out of their bedroom... as I ate the over cooked sausage, and competed for their orange juice and toast.

The guy for the weather service on the TV had a serious comb-over. I mean clearly this guy combed over the hair from one side of his head to the other over a great void, and then stuck it down with something, and come to think of it his hair was really dark for his age. Black against his pale skin. I could only think that his hair had become a frontal view mutation of what it had once been.

This is how we grow old I thought. We hang on to a vision of our former self. We look into the mirror and justify.

The other weather service guy on the TV had a full head of hair, but he didn't look any better. He just looked like an old guy with a full head of hair. The loose skin on his neck gave him away.

"Look at this fine thing" Chief Dan George said as he held up the salp of a white man. I could hear the fan as it came back on. d. d. d. d. d. d. d.d.d ddd. Then whosh. It was calming to hear the air come through that vent.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have a professor who is a really good guy, smart, nice, funny...the whole nine yards; but he has what we here refer to as the infamous Ziegler Comb-Over. It is very much like you described, and it is quite funny. I think in three years I have only seen him once without the comb-over, it was slightly shocking and proved very distracting as I try to listen to him speech French; I'm pretty sure I learned nothing in class that day.

don said...

This summer I had my hair cut really short (as my hair has been receding, not that I ever had a comb-over...) So now I have sort of a John Tester cut. It's kind of fun actually and easy to take care of.

I think your professor should cut his hair really short. There's really nothing worse than a comb-over.

I like the way you write BTW.