By John Carlson—
If there is one thing seven years of retirement have taught me, it is that senior citizens are the primary victims of “bed head.”
Well, those of us with some hair left are, anyway.
Not surprisingly, I got to thinking about this just the other day. What spurred it was I inadvertently caught my reflection in a window and gagged. Then estimating my total length of retirement so far, I calculated that I have walked around with an ugly case of bed head for the past 2,587 mornings.
So just what is bed head?
First, kids don’t have it. Their hair’s just naturally screwy.
Rather, bed head is the sort of traumatic hair look in older people that results from eight hours of tossing and turning in bed. This is usually due to worrying about age-related issues, such as not noticing two nights in a row that you have forgotten to take off your pants. Besides heightened anxiety, this manic bed wrestling may leave you with a classic untamed “Sasquatch” haircut. It can leave you with a bushy “Albert Einstein” cut, too.With excessive hair-sprayers, it may even give them a rocker “Wayne Cochran” bouffant hair job, also called an “Armadillo.” It has the benefit of leaving your hair looking neatly combed on the outside, while nurturing previously unknown microscopic life forms within its hardened shell.
One important thing to remember, though, is that technically, when you wake up with it, it’s not “bed head.”
Not yet.
No, no, no. As the sun breaches the eastern horizon, that’s just an example of plain old morning hair.
It becomes your classic bed head look about noon, after you’ve been walking around in public for five or six hours with hair that looks like it was styled with a cattle prod.
So how does one check to see if he or she has bed head? One way is to take a quick glance in a mirror. Another way is to approach a bank cashier to make a deposit. If he or she hollers, “Don’t shoot!” and drops to the floor, you’ve probably got bed head.
The third way is to simply ask your trusted spouse or significant other, “Honey, does my hair look like bed head?”
If they tell you, “Well, it IS making me woozy,” chances are you’ve got bed head.
Still, this third way is not necessarily foolproof. I have checked with Nancy on the possibility I am sporting bed head countless times in the course of our 39-year marriage. She, in turn, has gotten so sick of this and my other mindless inquiries, she just absentmindedly mutters, “Uh-huh. Everything’s super-duper.”
Thus informed, I have gone about my morning’s business with a calm feeling of self-assurance.
It’s only when I’ve gotten home for lunch that I’ve spotted myself in a mirror and freaked out. My hair DOESN’T look super-duper! It doesn’t look ANYWHERE NEAR super-duper!!! It looks like I’ve joined the walking dead!!!!
“I thought you said my hair looked super-duper!?!?!” I will holler at Nancy in an accusatory manner.
“It does look super-duper!!!” she will respond defensively, before finally taking a good look at my head. Then she will drop her voice by about eighty decibels and mumble, “… Comparatively speaking.”
“Compared to whom? Bozo? Rasputin? Medusa?”
Sure, even I know my hair isn’t as bad as that Greek god’s with the snakes growing out of his/her head. But not by much …
Indeed, my own classic bed head seems to start with snake-like tendrils from the front and back edges of my skull waving menacingly in the air. They then weave themselves together, forming a hairy barrier that would cause a panic if spotted approaching an island shoreline.
Hence, I call it “The Tsunami.”
Other times I’ll get a single shock of risen hair right in the middle, such as this column’s illustration. I have come to think of this bed head style as “Surf’s Up.”
Yet other times my hair looks like a nature sculpture capturing the interplay between a dog and a squirrel. I call it, “Cujo Kills Rocky.”
About this time Nancy will admit she hadn’t really paid much attention to how incredibly crappy my hair looked that morning, and my day will begin to make sense. The snickering among the Walmart deli workers when I bought some boneless chicken wings for lunch. The elbowing between my buddies at Cooper Tire when I took my pickup in for a lube and an oil change. The Vacation Bible Schoolers who ran screaming into their church sanctuary where they’d been outide playing “Red Rover, Red Rover” when I walked past. That style?
“The Exorcist.”
Not that I will stick around any of those places to enjoy the levity.
Instead, I will rush home and dip my head in a sink of hot water and comb my hair out, as perfectly and delicately as possible, until the bed headed lout that was scaring innocent VBS kids just minutes before has disappeared.
Then, for good measure, I pull on a sweater and some sneakers and coo, “Hi, neighbor!”.
That one I call the “Mister Rogers.”
Or, if it’s just a little bit creepy, the ”Mr. McFeely.”
John’s weekly columns are sponsored by Beasley & Gilkison, Muncie’s trusted attorneys for over 120 years.
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A former longtime feature writer and columnist for The Star Press in Muncie, Indiana, John Carlson is a storyteller with an unflagging appreciation for the wonderful people of East Central Indiana and the tales of their lives, be they funny, poignant, inspirational or all three. John’s columns appear on MuncieJournal.com every Friday.
