Longtime readers of my scribblings may remember Bop the Movie Dog, so named because his scruffy adorability fit the image of the family pet in a film you would take your kids to see on a day so nasty that they might otherwise murder each other.
Bop used up his allotment of dog years in 2004, but I became his avatar last weekend when, armed with only a rake, I strode into my flower beds and emerged an hour later bristling with burs. From the top of my head to the tip of my tail, if I had one, I was speckled with Virginia stickseed.
“It is doubtful,” quoth an online field guide to the flora of Minnesota, “anyone has taken many autumn walks in the woods without sooner or later ending up with a kazillion of these sticky seeds on their legs or socks as well as their pet’s hair.”
In my case, kazillion might be on the low side. Stickseed and its ilk are often referred to as hitchhiking plants. Bop’s long scraggly coat picked up more hitchhikers than a Volkswagen bus en route to a Grateful Dead concert. The protracted grooming sessions that ensued would yield a devil’s salad of prickers, burs and foxtails, along with enough collateral fur tufts with which to knit an entire doggy sweater.
Bop and I were a classic case of a man and a dog who begin to resemble each other. One difference between us: Bop had hair to spare. I do not. I may look bushy-haired, but there’s a bald spot toward the back of my head that, mercifully, I never see, and my hairline has retreated toward the top of my head like an Antarctic ice field in the age of global warming.
I was not, therefore, receptive to my gardening partner’s blithe assessment that the only way to deal with the matted stickseed situation on my noggin was to buzz it all off.
Easy for her to say. She didn’t know me when I sported the full Kaepernick, so she cannot appreciate how integral having Mixmaster hair has always been to my self-image. These days, I can get through a doorway without turning sideways, but I’m still as haircut-averse as David Crosby in that dippy song of his:
Almost cut my hair
Happened just the other day
It’s gettin’ kind of long
I could’ve said it was in my way
But I didn’t and I wonder why
I feel like letting my freak flag fly.
I’m afraid I’ve never gotten beyond the freak-flag stage of life. In fact, when recently asked to reveal one surprising fact about myself I confided that I cut my own hair, a tiny bit at a time, so I never look like I just got a haircut.
That must have been one of the ways in which I needed to differentiate myself from my dad. Whenever his hair so much as tickled the tops of his ears he announced that he looked like a shaggy dog and betook himself to the barbershop.
I, on the other hand, became a shaggy dog, even before I adopted one. I’d call myself an old hippie except I was never really a young hippie: never wore tie-dye or headbands or love beads, never flashed the peace sign or joined a commune or said “far out.” I just had the hair – and the anti-establishmentarian attitude. I wasn’t willing to give up either without a fight.
So my gardening partner and I fought. Not with each other, but with the little hitchhikers. She plucked them out of my hair, I plucked them out of my fleece. We probably looked like a couple of nitpicking baboons.
While engaged in this simian pursuit, I recalled the long-ago evening when my daughter held a battery-powered car too close to her head, with the result that a strand of her hair got wound tightly around the axle.
After a long and fruitless detangling session we concluded that we could either let her go about with a toy car dangling from her head, or take a scissors to her curly locks. She was little enough not to view an amateur impromptu haircut as a fashion catastrophe, so out came the clippers. Would that I were as unself-conscious.
I also recalled the time when, to look the part of a fedora-wearing sportswriter in a film set in the 1930s, I submitted to a shave and a short haircut. When, thus groomed, I walked in on my other daughter, she screamed: I was no longer her furry pop.
My groomer roused me from these reveries with an announcement that I was stickseed- free. I felt my head: still bushy.
Some of you may be wondering why I’ve told you this shaggy dog story. It was either this or a rant about a Congress that is lowering taxes on the rich while the world goes all to pieces. I figured I’d spare you the rant, at least this week.