It’s 9 a.m. and it’s still dark. Siri tells me it’s 6 degrees out there on Main Street. My phone says it’s higher. It must be the heat from all those lights in the Paul J. Schupf Art Center.

But as I looked in the mirror this morning, I caught my breath. What I saw looked like Tom Hanks the day he was fished out of the Pacific, sans the volleyball. It’s the hair. I have long bangs now.

Robert Redford has bangs, but he’s younger.

I’ve been putting off cutting my own hair (as I used to when COVID was calling), but everyone tells me that stuff is all over. Here’s the real reason: because Joe Richards, my personal barber for 39 years, had to take his right knee to the surgeon’s to have it replaced.

What — by the way — does that mean, “replaced?” Is there a gift shop in the hospital where, before you go to the table, you can select a new knee and find it stuck between the flowers, dolls and get-well cards?

Everyone knows I have two competing legs. One is 18 years of age and the other 87.
Even the great Mikhail Baryshnikov has knee problems. You don’t just replace a knee because it aches. What if someone asks you to dance? Is Mikhail dead? He’s not?

Nobody tells me anything anymore.

Anyway, down the longest driveway in Waterville I go.

Yes, it’s a bit slippery, but if the UPS women can do it, so can I. I guess if I slip I can just slide down. I did that once, and all the kids passing by applauded. Yeaaaa!

My plan for today is to motor down to Main Street to the “Headquarters Hair Salon,” and have Joe Richards do what I’ve taught him to do. Trim my hair.

I’m kidding, of course. He’s very good. He used to cut hair on a submarine.

Now, hitting the streets at dawn when Siri says it’s 6 degrees is not for sissies. I have a new Siri voice now; I chose “Irish,” and I try not to anger her, because she seems to sound like my mother when I ask, “What did you say?”

So here I am in my bright red British duffel coat ready to meet the day. I bought it in the thrift store that is now the Army Enlistment shop and they don’t wear red. Maybe they will in November.

It was $500 in London, but some poor kid who got it from a rich classmate up at Colby, they said, needed cash, and I got it for $25 bucks.

When, on days like this, every sidewalk is a Disney ride, even someone as agile and spry with too-long-bangs that need trimming could slip and fall flat on his face in front of the Paul J. Schupf Art Center.

That would be the end for me. Patrons going in the movies would nudge and whisper to each other, “Isn’t that J.P. Devine in his new red coat he got for $25 dollars?”

“Yes,” someone would answer. “It looks like he’s gone back to drinking.”

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer. 

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