My Easter Bonnet
I must start today with this EXTRA story. I have been reasonably disciplined in only posting one story per day for the last several months, but at the moment feel compelled to write this extra story. This morning is again a blustery weather day here in San Diego. I have an app on my devices that is called Dark Sky (a very ominous name made more ominous in these days of overthinking the outcome of this Coronavirus crisis). Dark Sky is an excellent and far more informative weather radar site that shows you a short-term and long-term weather outlook in terms of map-displayed cloud and precipitation cover. It has a more robust timespan that shows you about a week’s worth of backward and forward outlook so that you can see the weather pattern movements. It is far better than other radar apps I have and use. Well, this morning I note that San Diego has the worst weather of anywhere in the country. That is certainly a first for me. It is very nasty out and at 8am on a Friday morning I have already read everything in my inbox and communicated here and there with people about the things I can add value with at the moment. I am quite mindful of not chasing make-work things so as not to overburden people at this time.
I think that means that this will be a “read a book” day for me. This is Good Friday, so I will try to be good and both stay at home and stay with myself rather than annoy others with whatever boredom in inflicting me. I just saw on TV a church sign that said “Jesus rode an ass into Jerusalem on this day, leave your ass at home today.” That is not unlike one of favorite old jokes about Jesus tying his ass to a tree and walking forty miles. In 2010 Kim and I were in Jerusalem on the occasion of my visiting my then parent company (I was running the U.S. subsidiary of a big distressed real estate developer). We had taken a wild and crazy ride through the West Bank with a Palestinian with nice shoes (Kim’s rationalization as to why he was OK to trust). We had circumvented the border checkpoint (interesting scofflaw move) and been taken to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem to see the supposed site of the manger of Christ. Having seen where Christ was born, we went back into Jerusalem to walk up the Via Dolorosa to walk the crucifixion path and the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday. We happened to do it with some Franciscan monks carrying a full-sized cross. In so doing, we were filmed inadvertently by National Geographic and are forever in their Easter video about the religions of Jerusalem.
I have forced myself to consider an activity for today that requires help from Kim (she has yet to learn of this, but I will break it to her soon). Last night as I trimmed and thinned my beard and shaved around it to shape it, I decided to extend my buzzing to trim my hair. It has now been four weeks since I had a haircut and I am having a hard time imaging a time when it will be wise to submit myself and a barber to the facial closeness of such personalized service. Therefore, I took my clippers with what seemed like an appropriate plastic head (20mm, I think) and tried to give myself a haircut. I got lots of hair in the sink, but I have no way of knowing whether it was done evenly and I consciously stayed away from the top, so I probably have a homemade bowl but of sorts.
We do not need to take on any unnecessary “quarantined look” to remind people that we are all on lockdown, we can see it in each other’s eyes when we Zoom or FaceTime one another. Therefore, I’ve decided that I will ask Kim to give me a proper going-over to do what I cannot do by myself with a set of clippers and a mirror. I will strip to the waist, get a towel around my shoulders to catch the clippings (if we composted I would save them) and then jump into the shower right afterwards to un-prickly myself. The good news is that I have lots of hair, so any mistakes will probably go mostly unnoticed. The even better news is that I probably have another month afterwards during which I won’t have to worry about hirsute grooming other than my beard, which I can more-or-less handle by myself.
Kim has a different problem and at risk of telling tales about feminine grooming, I will tell you that her hair coloring is an issue I don’t share. She is involuntarily seeing what silver-gray hair under blonde hair looks like. She doesn’t seem to care about this too much and is treating it like an opportunity to finally test this as a new mature look. Kim is beautiful enough to pull it off. Her older sister has adopted this look for as long as I’ve known her and it works for her, so I assume it will work for Kim.
In any case, on this Easter weekend both Kim and I are trying out our own Easter Bonnets au naturelle.