Doing What I Can

My hairdresser of a couple of years recently moved back home to Ohio to become a dental hygienist and recommended a replacement, whom I've been to twice now. (The first time, 6 weeks ago, was a bit marred by the fact that my car wouldn't start -- battery -- and I had to take the bus, thus arriving 20 minutes late; today I made sure to arrive early to prove I wasn't a jerk!)

After two visits, the new hairdresser seems to be a decent one, perhaps a little better than the last. (The former would do two good haircuts in a row, then two very mediocre ones---it got so random that by the end of her "tenure," I'd see her once, then go to a totally different salon [also mediocre], then back to her... never totally satisfied.)

One thing I was struck by today was how utterly nice, and how utterly dumb, the new hairdresser is. Super-sweet and beautiful (she and a couple of the front-counter girls are extraordinarily beautiful, enough to make you stare and almost wish you were a 20-something amateur photographer, willing to falsely promise them stardom or at least a photo on the dude's blog), and super-conversational, with the ability to put the customer totally at ease, which is a fantastic quality for a hairdresser. But here's the thing: She would bring up a topic, and I would respond, and she would completely seem to be following, but then later indicate that she didn't really understand what was said...

Fer instance: She's in a book club along with fellow hairdressers (the same book club that the former hairdresser was in). I asked what current book her group is reading, but she couldn't remember the author's name or the exact title of the book. She said she found it hard to follow books, and I wondered if it was because younger people today (she's early 20s) had shorter attention spans because they grew up with the Internet, which encourages people to skip from thing to thing rather than focusing on one topic for a longer time. Once she got in the practice of reading, she'd get better at it.

She agreed, and added that her mother (probably about my age) was a big reader and would get in trouble for sneaking books into bed --- reading too late into the night. Me, too, I told her, and then also shared that I used to sneak listening to "alternative music" after hours in the early '80s in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, when FM radio stations played only Top 40 or else "album rock" --- except for one late-night Sunday show that played then-up-and-coming bands like U2 and The Clash and REM from midnight until 2am.

"Oh, U2, I've heard of them!" OK. So I thought I'd established that I was a teen in the early '80s, sneaking listens to U2, etc.

Then she asked me what music I liked to listen to today. For simplicity's sake, I did NOT AT ALL want to say "Well, for the past couple of weeks, Tchaikovsky cello music because I've been reading a lot about the last of the Russian tsars and that's a great soundtrack." NO. What I did say was, "Well, Aretha Franklin just died recently, so I've been listening to her debut album a lot. And my favorite band of all time is the Beatles."

"The Beatles! Did you ever get to see them in concert?"

Their last concert was in 1966, when I was a year old. I don't think she knew who the Beatles were.

But... she's super-nice, and beautiful. And she was concerned because it was her turn next to recommend a book for her book group, but she didn't know what to suggest. "Life of Pi," she had finally come up with. I told her that I'd heard good things about the movie, but hadn't seen it or read the book. Who was the author? She didn't know. All I could offer was: "If you're not sure, you should check out the reviews for the book on Amazon, to see how other people liked it. If it got good reviews, then maybe your book-club members would also like it."