A BIT NOSTALGIC

Dear Spike:

At nearly five months old, your hair is still just a little tuft of fluff, most of it running down the center of your head.

That’s fine by me, as it makes for a righteous mohawk. Just a little water (or spit, depending upon what’s available) a few strokes and — voilà! — a wicked mane to match your name.

In fact, yours is such a cool ‘do that I started to get a bit nostalgic.

The last time I sported a mohawk — a spiky, Kool-aid red one, it was — I was 17 years old. I wasn’t a punk or an anarchist. I was just a kid who, with a few weeks to go before leaving for basic training, wanted to revel in what little freedom he had remaining.

By the time I’d ended my service to our empire, my hairline had receded to a point that made it rather ridiculous to even consider wearing a mohawk — or for that matter, wearing hair at all. Fact is, the last time I had any hair on my head was around the time I married your mother. Shortly thereafter, I started shaving my head completely. And I’ve been doing so ever since.

But with my paternity leave, last month, came an opportunity to let my hair out, so to speak. I had no bosses to impress. No one needed to take me seriously — least of all myself. And your mother, bless her heart, said she couldn’t care less how I wore my hair, so long as I promised to make sure that you were getting fed and changed on a regular basis.

It wasn’t really much of a mohawk. Not the way you might imagine one, anyway. My hairline starts at a place near the apex of my skull — perhaps an inch toward my nose from there.

I called it a halfhawk.

It was pretty ugly. But I kind of liked it. Still, I knew I’d have to shave it off eventually.

And I knew exactly when that would be.

I used to dress up for work every day. Slacks, shirt, tie, suspenders — even a fedora hat, sometimes.

The whole bit.

These days, though, I spend a lot less time in the office. And on the days when I actually do make an appearance there, it’s typically in shorts, sandals and a T-shirt— often the one I slept in the night before.

Most of the folks with whom I work know that, if I do happen to come to work in a tie, it’s because someone died.

One of the more somber parts of my job at the newspaper is writing about local soldiers who are killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Most things get easier with time and experience. This job is the exception.

To date, I’ve written the front-page obituaries of more than 30 slain service members. They have died in mortar attacks, roadside explosions, shootings, accidents and suicide bombings. After a while, I know, the readers of my paper have stopped distinguishing one dead soldier from another. It’s my job to give them a reason to pay attention, one more time.

And no, it never gets any easier. It’s a miserable assignment — made bearable only by the faint promise that, in telling these stories, I might in some small way be helping to dispel the utterly fictional notion that war is glorious.

War is not glorious. War is hell. War is the hell of hell.

And if the hell of hell has its own hell, it is involuntarily populated by the soul-crushed families of those left behind to ponder where all the flowers have gone.

I met Carol Thomas Young a day after she lost her son, Brandon, in a bombing in Baghdad. She struck me as remarkably poised for a women who had suffered so great a loss. Later, she would describe that day — and all of the days and weeks following Brandon’s death — as surreal, frightening and confusing.

“I walked around in a haze for the better part of that year,” she recently told me.

Amidst everything else they are going through, I doubt my appearance in shorts and sandals — or even a mohawk, for that matter — could possibly make things any worse for these families.

Still, I prefer not to find out. And so it was that, at about 12:45 this afternoon, I found myself in the bathroom, madly running the electric clippers over my scalp before hopping into a pair of slacks, a clean shirt, tie, jacket and fedora hat.

On the drive out to West Valley City, where I was to meet the family of a soldier who was killed Tuesday in Afghanistan, I thought about the mess of hair I’d left in the sink.

And I started to get a bit nostalgic. For a haircut I’d lost only minutes earlier.

Not because it was fun. And not because it looked good — because it certainly did not. And not even because I enjoyed sharing a hairdo with my daughter — which I certainly did.

No, I missed being able to say, “I’ll shave it off the next time I have to interview a dead soldier’s family,” and being able to imagine that day would never come.

When will I ever learn?

Love,
dad