Daddy Days: The Barber of Pflugerville

It’s good to broaden your horizon and learn new things. I recently saw an opportunity to do something new and tried my hand at cutting the boy's hair. My wife is typically the family barber but when the new baby was born, I thought I’d look up some videos on how to cut hair and give it a go on the boys.

I’ve always liked the idea of being a barber. Having a little shop on main street in a small town where men would go to hang out and get a trim sounded like a good setup. I’d have a neat row of shiny cutting implements, a checkered floor worn from use but swept clean of every hair, and a shelf in front of the mirror with special tonics and aftershaves. There’d be an eclectic mix of '50s and '60s tunes playing at the perfect conversational volume.

Perhaps my vision is 70 or so years out of date. And seven or so kids past any sort of reality. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t set up shop at home.

The 11-year-old was game to be my guinea pig. The deal was he would let me try it out and if I messed it up he could keep it and look like his favorite baseball player Yuli "the Pineapple" Gurriel (whose crown sprouts long spiky locks of hair like a pineapple).

I set him up in a tall bar stool, the closest approximation of a barber’s chair we had. I clasped the haircut cloak around his neck and cued up some tunes by the Penguins.

And then I hit that tiny little wrinkle romantics and idealists have been tripping over for centuries: reality.

It was a disaster. The disconnect between what the video showed and my attempts at mimicry was stunning. I made a cut with scissors at one point that has to be the picture they show you in barber school for what it looks like when you cut too long, short, uneven and wonky at the same time.

I commend the 11-year-old’s patience. I told him it would be a slow haircut but I hadn’t expected it to be a 62-minute affair. If his hair was really wet, and you didn’t have great lighting, and sort of squinted it looked … like a bad haircut.

I decided I needed to go back to barber school and wouldn’t do any further experimentation on the other boys. And this is where it gets really embarrassing.

The other boys (well, the 11-year-old, too) still needed haircuts. So, while I was at work and while the newborn baby was taking a newborn-length nap, my wife did the boys haircut. It took less than 30 minutes. For ALL of them.

Not only did their haircuts look good, I also couldn’t help picturing my wife doing those haircuts while holding the newborn in one hand and the hair clippers with the other. Even though that wasn’t the case, the whole thing was a further blow to my barbering aspirations.

When I asked, in no small wonder, how she did this she let me in on some secrets. One was not to try and use scissors. It’s slow, it’s hard to do with the wiggly boys, and it just doesn’t work if you don’t know what you’re doing. Agreed.

The second was to use the special clipper guards she had ordered that have in-between sizes for blending the sides with the top. This means no guesswork and no experience needed to blend. And the third thing she said I didn’t hear because I realized the real secret was letting my wife do the haircutting. After all, she taught herself to do this and has more practice trimming hair off of melon-headed Harris boys than anyone in the world.

Despite the truth of all this, my barbering ambition isn’t entirely dead. Old dreams die hard, I guess. Plus, I learned even my wife’s barbering has its limits. Because even she couldn’t fix my butcher job of the 11-year-old’s hair.

Harris and his wife live in Pflugerville with their seven children. Please email comments or suggestions for future columns [email protected].