Visitors here may recall that last month, when recounting how a Quebec City emergency-room nurse recommended Pepsi-Cola as a cure for incipient strangulation (see “Je me souviens”), I was moved to make what could be thought an unkind and indefensible comparison to similar medicinal beliefs in Ireland.
Unkind, perhaps. Indefensible? You be the judge of that.
A crucial piece of exculpatory evidence emerged – in a story I had never heard before – during a conversation with my father here in Ottawa last night. He is about ten days shy of his eighty-ninth birthday, so our interaction can be somewhat stop-and-start, when not wandering into fields of weirdness. Or it can be lyrical. Depends on the day.
Yet one sturdy artifact that has survived wholly intact from our past is his active, mischievous interest in my hair. Ever since my teen years, it has been too long. Now it’s white. When did that happen? Looks greasy. Looks unkempt. Is it thinning? When you going to get it cut? Etc.
Last night the stars aligned differently and the hair hectoring ceased. Not only that, the subject turned to his hair – specifically. his very first haircut, in his hometown of Tralee, County Kerry. He must have been about four or five, and his mother decided it was time for her curly-headed eldest to get a proper shearing.
His father, my grandfather, was instructed to bring the little boy to the barber. It was the mid-1920s, in what was then a remote corner of Ireland.
Before they left, however, his mother handed his father a small bottle of whiskey. A brief discussion ensued, but, as usual, the woman won.
So the haircut took place. My father cried. His father squirmed.
When it was over my grandfather held out the bottle of whiskey to the barber.
“Now what might that be for?” the barber inquired.
“It’s the lad’s mother,” my father’s father replied, scientifically. “You’re to massage his scalp with it, so he doesn’t catch cold on the way home.”
The defense rests.
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