The announcement was casually made in front of our living room mirror as Mom stroked my two-year-old hair, “We are going to get this cut.” The shock was instant. I was going to be “cut.” Cutting hurt and I had no reason to believe cutting my hair would be any less painful than cutting off fingers or toes.
My protests, apparently laughable, were ignored, and I was unjustly packed into the family’s Packard and off we went.
Entering the shop there he stood, as sinister a sight as any little boy had ever seen. He just stood motionless looking down at me. Recognizing my fear, that grim-faced, slick-haired, spectacled little man with the tiny mustache and stiff white shirt grimaced and looked up at my mom. I was doomed.
My terror was splayed open for all to see as I took in the various fluid-filled jars containing combs and cutting devices, along with assorted objects plugged into electrical sockets behind him. And the chair, OH GOD that chair, what was it? Huge with various handles and levers and a long leather strap swaying at its side. I lost it!
Dismissing a child’s fears as simple childishness is so convenient to an adult who has long forgotten the traumas of their own first-time childhood horrors: the time you first got the needle at the doctor’s office, wobbled and crashed that first two-wheeler attempt, the dark that came at night, when you first rode The Hammer at the State Fair, or just the creaking noises in the closet when all were asleep. . . and a hundred other childhood traumas.
Most adults could easily revisit those fears by trying a bungee jump or first sky dive, taking a quick dip into a frozen lake or maybe a bit of harmless water boarding – all would likely do the trick and give a taste of what we have forgotten about first-time events. And you will never have so many first-time events as you did as a child.
Anyway, I stood in front of the barber butcher, and he was going to cut me. For some incomprehensible reason the person I trusted most in life, picked up a box, placed it on the torture device and stuck me to it – then let the butcher have his way with his sharp pointy objects. My fear was intense and real. My mother, like all mothers, knew such fears absurd, but mine also had the presence of mind to see an opportunity for posterity and documented the event.
Richard Kimball
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