Annual Haircut

A couple of pictures from my "annual haircut" and then back to my "4th of July" series.

As you can tell, I take this very seriously. Well, I have lightened up a bit in the past couple years.

A little background: on June 29, 2003 my best friend of 13 years died from non-smokers lung cancer. July 16, 2003 would have been his 32nd birthday.

My friend loved life, his wife and his girls and I still miss him. A lot.

Immediately after my friend's death, I felt compelled to do something to express my grief. Being who I am, I did some research on bereavement traditions in different cultures.

I found that, after the death of a loved one, people in one ancient culture would let their hair grow. That just didn't seem drastic enough. Then I found that people of another ancient culture would shave their heads. As it turns out, a short time before my friend died we spoke on the phone and he told me that chemo had made him "completely hairless" and he was tired of the side effects so he wasn't going to take any more treatments. So on July 16, 2003, while my wife and daughter were vacationing with my parents, I shaved my head, moustache and beard.

Now each year my "drastic tradition" continues to evolve a bit. Each year it is less about me and my grief and more about marking a date but getting on with life.

My wife gives me an initial haircut and trim and my daughter takes pictures.

Each year my wife and daughter have been more and more involved until, this year, I just told my wife "I want you to cut my hair as short as you can stand it. You don't have to shave my head, just cut my hair short."

You see, last year she cut my hair and gave me a trim and then I shaved my head. She didn't really take that as a compliment somehow. Go figure.

Even though she knew that "the haircut" was coming up, my wife has been nagging me for a couple months to cut my beard. Her line is "It makes you look old" and then she'll call me "viejo" or some other Spanish term of endearment. This last pic is basically how the beard looks now. I said "You're not gonna shave it off??" and my beautiful wife says "No, then I'll look older than you!"

One final note. Do you notice both my wife and I are slightly out of focus but the pitcher (several feet behind me and in the center of the picture) is in perfect focus? This is exactly why I hate autofocus cameras. (I know you wanted to know that :-)