I’ve never been asked for a lock of my hair.
If there’s anyone out there who longs for some, they’d better hurry because my locks are leaving me with great abandon.
In fact, I now grow more hair in and on my ears than I do on my head.
And from time to time – perhaps as a result of a lunar phase or climate change – I also experience volunteer sprigs coursing out from my eyebrows.
Those Andy Rooneyisms grow at a rate of about an inch an hour.
When it’s real quiet around our house, I can actually hear one yearning to be free, squeaking along like an old nail being pulled from a barn board, or a volunteer corn stalk struggling to survive in an over-crowded soybean field somewhere.
I asked my barber friend Bob Melmer down at Razor’s Edge what he did with all the hair collected each day around his barber chair.
I don’t contribute all that much barbershop debris anymore. And Bob isn’t too excited about giving a discount for the few swipes he takes for my haircut every four or five weeks.
That process is about a two-minute drill for him, so our gossiping during the procedure has atrophied to maybe a brief discussion about the weather.
So most of the hair falling to the floor at Razor’s Edge is from the youngsters. With re-purposing and recycling being the cat’s meow these days, you’d think all that excess hair could be repurposed as pillow stuffing or wrestling mat padding or something.
Now, Bob just sends his sweepings on to the landfill.
In World War II, human hair was used as cross hairs in the famed Norden bombsight. Early automobiles used horsehair for seat cushions, but as far as I know the human hair supply in those days wasn’t enough to fill the bill.
Pioneer men seldom shaved or visited a barber.
In the early part of the last century, and the one before that, giving and keeping locks of hair was a rather common practice.
A friend in Brookings has an old watch fob made from his grandfather’s woven hair. Lockets on necklaces often held a lock of hair of a loved one.
My granddad Charlie had a lock of my grandmother Daisy’s hair. He kept it in the back of his pocket watch.
All this business about hair or the lack thereof came to mind the other day as I was reading about Civil War Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest.
On May 3, 1863, the ladies of Rome, Ga., were overjoyed to be out of danger after Forrest’s cavalry chased federal raiders from their city.
When he rode into Rome on his prancing horse, the women had strewn his army’s path with flowers. They besieged him with handshakes, kisses, words of thanks and requests for a lock of his hair.
One of the most elaborate uses for human hair I know of was made as a wall hanging. It’s part of the collection of the more than 6,000 items at the Brookings County Museum in Volga’s City Park (open daily 1 to 4 p.m.).
It’s in a circular frame about 12 inches in diameter. In pioneer days it was considered a work of art.
The hair was woven tightly in a geometric design, interspersed with small, colorful beads. In the early days out here on the flatlands, housewives would often pass the long winter days weaving human hair into decorative pieces.
The hair they used was harvested from brushes and combs in the household, and saved on those very rare occasions when pioneers actually had their hair cut.
Perhaps my wife, an expert quilter and knitter, will branch out and braid up some beautiful picture this winter made from my hair and frame it.
She won’t need a very big frame.
If you’d like to comment, email the author at cfcecil@swiftel.net.
