Hair Grows Back

During the pandemic, my wife learned how to cut my hair, and the training material was me. The first attempts were not especially successful. I described the results at the time by saying she had repeatedly turned me into a monkey, which was unfair to monkeys but accurate enough about my confidence when I looked in the mirror.

Hair grows back, so we continued. By August, something had changed: the cuts had become good enough that the experiment no longer felt like an emergency solution. At the same time, the price I remembered from before the pandemic had risen sharply. A service that had once seemed ordinary now invited a calculation.

Why go back? Only a few months earlier, the question would have sounded strange. Haircuts belonged outside the home. You went somewhere, sat down, someone else handled the problem, and you returned with less hair.

Then the house began absorbing tasks that had once belonged elsewhere. Work, meetings, exercise, and many other parts of daily life moved indoors. In our case, haircuts did too. What began as a temporary answer to a closed world slowly became a normal household skill.

The part that stayed with me was the learning curve rather than the saving. Something that had once seemed to belong entirely to professionals became possible through repetition. Each attempt corrected a little of the previous one, although I had to wear every stage of that education in public whenever I left the house.

By the time the result became reliable, cutting hair at home no longer felt unusual. Paying someone else to do it had become the stranger idea.