Nice Haircut!

Dad spent the last couple of decades of his life as an out-patient at the VA hospital in Nashville. He actually had several surgeries while there after his initial one. When he was there for any extended time, mom and I would stay at the Hospital Hospitality House.

It was not an uncommon thing for me to find myself wandering the halls of the hospital. There wasn't much in particular to do there at that time, so I would simply satisfy my curiosity about the place. Sometimes mom or dad were with me; sometimes I was alone.

It was usual to meet doctors and nurses and veterans walking the halls. Being me, I would normally say “hi” to them. They would respond in kind.

On many occasions, one of those old vets would tell me or my parents how much they liked my haircut. They'd remark about how so many of the boys at that time would wear long hair and how they didn't like it. (This was the late seventies and early eighties.) They might say how much like a man I looked and how proud my parents should be. I would always smile and thank them. It always made me feel good to have those old men say such nice things. Looking back, I 'm sure that it made mom and dad feel good too.

Something I have thought of over the years, that I didn't then, was that these “old men” were likely WW II and Korean War veterans. They were certainly, as I recall, too old for Vietnam and they're attitude toward hair would likely have been different.

I was always a parent oriented child, as opposed to peer oriented, and just being complimented by these gentlemen who, in so many ways, were like my parents, was just one of the things I had the good sense to appreciate. To this day, when I'm at work or in town, if I notice a young boy with, what I might call, a respectable coiffure, I always try to say something to the boy in the presence of his parents like, “Nice haircut!”