Everyone has their own birthday rituals. Some women take spa days, some wine collectors drink a special bottle from their cellars, some people sit and wallow in self-pity. I know a guy who is severely lactose intolerant, and once a year on his birthday, he indulges in a few pints of premium ice cream and then has the courtesy to sequester himself in privacy for a few hours as the effects take place. It’s a small price to pay, he says, for a once-a-year treat.Me, I get a haircut. Wherever I am, I find a barber and get a trim, whether I need it or not. One year, I was in Istanbul and got the best haircut of my life. Once I was in Boston and spent an hour in the barber’s chair with scissors snipping and razors buzzing but left with no discernible change to my hair at all. I left a Manhattan barber shop in the East Village looking like a chrysanthemum. And I will never forget the birthday when I realized that I was old enough to need my eyebrows trimmed.
I travel a lot, especially in June, my birthday month, which intensifies the risk. To walk into a barbershop in a city where you don’t speak the language, settle into the chair, and gesture vaguely at your own head — Have at it! — is to surrender control to a stranger holding sharp instruments very close to your face. You don’t know his work. He doesn’t know your hair. You don’t even know how serious they are in that establishment about hand-washing and barbicide. In Delhi, many decades ago, I knew exactly how serious they were about both, because I was sitting in a wooden chair by the side of the road. There was no barber’s license or jar of blue disinfectant visible, but I took my chances anyway, and it turned out OK. On a scale of one to the chrysanthemum, it was a five.
