everybody blamed his old man

"Looking in the mirror just now, I realized something. I look kind of like a young Jerry Reed minus the curls."

"Yes," replied the wife, "You do."

Her quick agreement caught me off guard. Maura usually responds to my self-deprecating observations with something along the lines of "Oh, no. You look fine." (Not that my intent is to fish for compliments, mind you, though the pond is well-stocked.) Even more telling was that she followed up her response with an offer to trim my sideburns, despite her long held and deep-seated reluctance about such matters. She has balked on several occasions when I've asked her help in trimming a few wayward hairs missed by my barber; for her to offer her services unsolicited means that my personal style has crossed a line.

Not that I did so intentionally. Semi-intentionally, perhaps. My preference is to keep my hair buzzed short, but the past dozen weeks or so have been rather busy. The weekdays off that I would normally use to visit the barber's have been consistently booked up with other, more pressing affairs like vet appointments for the animals or shoveling out the driveway and walk after an overnight snowstorm.

So my hair has grown unchecked for three months, which isn't that rare an occurance. What made this time different, though, was my decision to not keep my sideburns in check during my weekly shaves. The decision was made to avoid the hassle of trying to keep both sides even while having to clean the clots of hair out the blades with each and every pass of the razor. So I let them grow, and grow they did -- down past my earlobes and out onto my cheeks, and eventually forming little projecting curls.

I was okay with their unchecked development. After all, they were going to be buzzed clean off come the next visit to the barbershop. I didn't realize that it had become a household issue until I was standing by Maura's desk at work, and she reached up and tugged one of the curls while I was talking to her. She said then that they were "kinda funny," though I began to notice a gradual escalation of negative descriptive rhetoric -- nothing directly confrontational, but clear in intent (like "seventies man hair," for example).

If things have reached the stage where she thinks I'd qualify for a quest appearance on the Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour or the second season of Alice, it's clearly time for me to take swift action in the interest of keeping the domestic peace. Until then, however, I plan on singing my nasally off-key renditions of "Eastbound and Down" and "U.S. Male" in Maura's presence at every opportunity.

Jerry Reed - Amos Moses (from RCA Country Legends, 2001) - Bitterandrew was a Squarehead, and lived with his wife on a hill/He had a powerful pair of sideburns, but they made his poor sweetie ill...