Reflections

Cutting your own hair is easy. Except, of course, for a few challenges. First, you have to figure out how short it should be, and resist changing your mind mid-exercise. Then you have to sort out how to move the scissors in the mirror so that your hands are traveling one way when your eyes tell them to reverse course and go the other. Finally, if are fortunate to have hair roots evenly distributed across your scalp, you simply can’t see some sections of your head very well. For those parts, you need to work by feel, trusting the evidence you see in your fingers and in the sink after your handiwork regarding the accuracy of your aim.

It would be easier, you might be say, to have someone else do this, someone trained in such things, someone unencumbered by the obvious shortcomings of self-service hair styling. That would be the perspective, a wise one indeed, shared by my wife and daughters. Just because we live during the time of a pandemic, just because we have moved houses during that time, and just because I am nervous about finding a new hair stylist who is likely touching lots of hair on heads of people not always taking the pandemic seriously – those are not good reasons to abandon six decades of practicality and take the trimming of my own grey locks into my own sometimes unsteady hands. They are right. You are right. But I am stubborn. And I have a pair of scissors that used to belong to my mother. Those scissors could not let me down.

I suppose I have been stubborn my entire life. The descriptor, however, is not one that family have often used to describe me. “You are such a Gemini,” Mom used to say. “He’s a real Gemini alright,” my wife has oft echoed. The statements were always made with a mix of love and gentle jibing, as if the qualities of my personality, should they be tossed into a kitchen blender, might yield a semi-pleasing if not slightly bitter result.

All that changed last week when my youngest daughter announced that there are now thirteen signs of the zodiac. Apparently, scientists have known for years about the thirteenth constellation but only recently have elected to do anything with that knowledge. This is perhaps what happens when people are stranded in their houses during a pandemic and have too much time to themselves. After weeks behind closed doors, one or more have decided that the world, long accustomed to the calendar notion of twelve, needs to face the fact that it has been wrong about still something else, that the cultural desire for comfort in the customs and traditions of twelve should be exposed for what it was, is, and has always been: incorrect. So somewhere, somehow, somebody let the information leak about the not-so-new constellation. And just like that, I am no longer a Gemini.

“You are such a Taurus,” my wife and youngest daughter told me a few nights ago. “So stubborn.”

In my daughter’s defense, she acknowledged (with a wink) that some of the online descriptions about Taurus did not fit me. But others apparently did. Besides, both she and my wife enjoyed how the shifting zodiac calendar moved them to signs and constellations that seemed to better match their own self-images. “I knew I wasn’t a Leo,” one said. “I never felt like an Ares,” the other added.

Please don’t misunderstand: I am all for truth and the importance of change, despite the pain associated with such change. I am also not opposed to either astrology or to its application in our world and do not necessarily object to the addition of a new constellation or sign (Ophiuchus). And I realize that I am, not unsurprisingly, behind the times, the information of this emerging astronomic evidence having filtered down to me relatively late in the global news cycle. Still I will admit that I was a bit unsettled to learn that lots of people have known about this for some time. Beyond that, I was at least a touch offended to be told that I needed to relinquish my title as typical Gemini and accept, gracefully and without argument, the new moniker of Taurus. I like twins. I don’t like bulls. I’ve come to enjoy looking for advice about Geminis in horoscopes. I personally think the name Gemini is just pretty cool.

Nonetheless, the world tells me that I must adapt. Adapt then I shall. So this morning I boldly embodied my willingness to embrace change in my bathroom’s walk-up, no appointment necessary, hair salon. It was clear from the start that I was going to make a mess of things. A Gemini might have changed his mind. Not a Taurus. I cut. I cut some more. I turned fingers and hair to and fro in contorted maneuvers to clip and snip myself to a countertop covered with grey. I worked quickly, finishing the job before anyone could look where I was and talk me out of it. It feels good too, the product of my stubbornness, when I inspect it with my own hands. My fingers don’t get stuck in aging wires of uninspectable brittle white as I run them over the back of my scalp. Those fingers have lost the ability to judge distance accurately and I can’t help them with mirrors and eyeglasses. Absent any objective information to the contrary, they are therefore happy. And I guess so am I.

All that’s left is for me to now let someone else view the results. Perhaps the people who know me best, the ones who have forced me to accept that I was never who and what I thought I was, will take pity on me given that I’ve enveloped myself with the mantle of newfound and newly accepted Taurusness – and they will help me fix the uneven result I’ve made. That was, truth be told, my real goal all along. Please don’t tell them though, or at least wait until they’ve evened me out.

Somewhere in the afterlife, Mom is shaking her head and smiling. You can guess what she’s saying.