Adventure of  A Haircut..

I rode my bike to this funny little hair salon today. I usually go to places that take walk-ins because I like to get my hair cut spontaneously. You never know when you’ll get just the right haircut at some cheap little unfashionable place, or so I always hope.

Unfashionable would be an understatement for this place. This sliver of a store is right on the corner of a huge intersection of diagonal avenues. Its walls of windows are haphazardly hung with bright-orange, puffy-shaped letters spelling out CUT COLOR PERM. From inside, you see out in two directions on the traffic and the Grease Monkey oil-change garage across the road.

I’m guessing the salon has been in business there since the late 1960s, based on the white fluorescent lighting, the white walls, the absence of décor, and the accumulation of odds and ends on every surface. I can’t say it was like stepping back in time, but it was a world completely different from the world of trendy salons.

Loosely run by ladies too old to be middle aged and too young to be elderly, the salon is not just cluttered but piled with magazines, romance novels, and dusty, half-knocked-over souvenir knick-knacks. The level of activity in the place, although it was both small and busy, was so low-key that, combined with the general frumpiness and badlooking hair, I couldn’t tell right away who worked there and who was waiting for a haircut. When I walked in, my stylist was sitting in one of the chairs reading a magazine until she got up to take down my name and get the shampoo lady’s attention. Sitting down to talk about the haircut while the hair was dry seemed not to be part of how things are done. I was willing to go with the flow, having wasted pointless anxiety about haircuts in the past. (Remember being a teenager and not yet knowing the protocol of getting a haircut on your own in a stylish salon instead of at home by your mom’s friend?)

While the lady cut my hair, we chatted about a new construction project nearby (a community center and driver’s licensing office), last night’s earthquake (her dog woke up), and whether I use my bike for racing or commuting. She was very nice and I’m sorry for thinking she looked terrible. She stopped every so often to verify what I wanted her to do in a particular place, like by my temples, where I wanted the hair (though very short) to frame my face and not make me look like a new-shorn male sailor. She noticed each cowlick, though my hair is so fine (I refuse to say “thin”) that my cowlicks only create unflattering bare spots. (I hope I’m exaggerating.)

The haircut turned out okay, the same as it usually turns out wherever I go, as long as it doesn’t end up with that sailor look. When I wear my hair short like this, those are pretty much the two options, okay or sailor. No, there’s a third, when it’s too short even for me and my head just looks completely round.

When I left the place, I remembered that I was on the same block where a book-club friend used to live. It’s the kind of place that seems to provide a glimpse of old Seattle, before the 1990s boom and before the Rainier Valley was really urban. This odd corner building, because of the oblique angle of the intersection, is adjacent on three sides to buildings that resemble a miniature rural village. Arranged in roughly a square are a group of tiny wood-frame cottages. They’re mostly surrounded by laurel hedges higher than the buildings, so from a car it’s impossible to see them. They must be close to 100 years old and they’re plain; they don’t have the style of the old Seattle Craftsman houses. Between the several buildings, which are peeling but serviceable and occupied, is a sunken yard below street level. Completely shaded by the overgrown laurels and by trees, and obscured from the sidewalk (but I visited once, for the book club meeting), the yard is as leafy and tranquil-looking as any rural valley.

One of the cottages, whose front door is set back from the sidewalk hardly at all, has little garden-patches on each side of the front step, falling over with peonies and roses, old and neglected but prolific. The cottage is so small that it can hardly contain more than one room, but someone has recently replaced its windows with vinyl sliding ones. Somebody lives there.

The excellent local history site HistoryLink (you can’t link to individual essays) has details about this part of the city—it was home to truck farms for a long time as well as to a large, popular minor-league baseball stadium until the late 1970s. There’s now a Lowe’s home-improvement warehouse where the stadium was.

I feel so rewarded when I get a glimpse into Seattle’s past by looking at inconspicuous, neglected places that are oddly still there, not fitting in at all with today’s landscape. Somehow I feel like I’m doing my job, as if it’s my job to notice obscure places and details.

THE END