This morning I made breakfast for Nils and me and when Nils came into the kitchen, he looked like he had just gotten out of bed. Which, when you think about it, was what had happened. Besides yawning and stretching, his hair was sticking out all over the place. It really was a case of bedhead!

When I saw him, I must have gasped or something, because he said, “What’s wrong?”

I watched as he sat down and said, “You look like something the cat dragged in. What time did you come to bed, anyway?”

“I was working late on a painting of a new model. I guess I got in about 2. Do I really look that bad?”

“Well,” I said, “if you had been drinking, I could understand it. Your hair’s a mess. Didn’t you take a shower?”

“No,” he answered. “I smelled the bacon and thought I’d rather eat first. That OK?”

“Of course, it is. But,” I said as I ruffled his hair a little, “I think it’s time you got a haircut. Do you have anything going on tonight after dinner?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Let me check my calendar later and I’ll let you know. Are you saying you want to cut my hair?”

“I used to cut Grandpa’s hair and he and Grandma always liked how I did it. I think you would, too.”

“OK, let me check out what’s going on in the studio today, and I’ll let you know. Is it really that bad?”

“Yeah. Even your beard looks like it could use a trim!”

He ran his hand over his beard-covered chin. “OK,” he said. “I’ll even let you trim the beard a little.”

I put some eggs and a couple slices of bacon onto his plate next to a slice of toast and placed it before him. “I’ll get the scissors, trimmer and a towel and we can do it here in the kitchen where I won’t have to vacuum the carpet, OK?”

He nodded as he ate his breakfast. He left his plate and coffee cup on the table. I sighed and picked them up. I heard the water running and figured he was taking his shower, so I was nice and didn’t do the dishes until after he was done. Soon, he was dressed and headed out the door to his studio. He stopped just long enough to give me a kiss on the cheek and he told me he’d call about his schedule.

At least he did that! He called a while later and said his calendar was clear and was I sure about cutting his hair? I said I was and he said it was a date. I love touching his hair. Even though it’s so grey, it’s still very thick. His beard is the same way. One time, I was commenting on how thick his hair and beard were and we wondered just how thick they were and did each hair measure the same.

We set it up as a kind of science project. He had some calipers that measured thicknesses down to a thousandth of an inch. We cut a couple of head hairs, a couple of beard hairs, and he pulled a couple of hairs from his mustache. We measured each hair a couple of times each to be sure we had an accurate measure, then we compared them. His head hair, while thick, was the thinnest of the three types of hair. His beard hair was right in the middle and his mustache was the thickest.

I joked with him about how they all differed and I wondered how his pubic hair would fare, so we plucked a couple of those hairs and measured them. They measured somewhere between the beard hair and his mustache hair.

Then, he said we should measure my hair and compare it with my pussy hair, but when we went to pluck a pussy hair, the joke was on him! There was no hair to be found, as I shave it off every couple of days. (My head hair was a little thinner than his, so we did have something to which we could compare.)

After dinner, I had Nils push the kitchen table off to the side and I placed one of the kitchen chairs underneath the ceiling fan with the lights. I turned off the fan, and the lights gave me enough light to see all of what I had to do, and there was a lot of it. I don’t think he had cut his hair for a couple of months!

He sat in the chair, nude and I put the sheet around his shoulders to catch some of the hair as it fell. I was wearing some stockings Nils liked me to wear, but I took them off so that they wouldn’t collect the hair as it fell. I decided to not wear the apron, so I was as nude as he was, and if we got hairy, we could just jump in the shower and rinse it off.

Luckily, when we started, he was not as disheveled as he was at breakfast. His hair was still long, and before I started, I stood in front of him, straddling his legs. I ran my fingers through his hair, starting at the front and working my way to the back of his skull. He closed his eyes and just groaned.

“I’ll give you an hour to stop doing that,” he mumbled as I did it a couple of more times. I enjoyed massaging his scalp and it gave me a real feel for how his hair laid on his skull. However, I wasn’t there to give him a scalp massage: I was there to give him a haircut. I just had to decide which hair to cut! Haha!

His hair was much thicker than Grandpa’s had been. Grandpa wasn’t bald, but it was thinning on top, so I had to keep the hair near the middle a bit longer than the rest of his hair so that he could comb over the bald spot. Nils, on the other hand, did not have a bald spot, so I could just cut it evenly everywhere. I started by combing the hair, then using my first two fingers lengthwise, pulled some until the bit I had was just about a finger-width further than my fingers. I cut that small portion, then did the steps over again and again until I had traveled all over his scalp. Watching Grandma as she cut Grandpa’s hair for so long, and then doing it myself, I taught myself how to be a decent barber; at least on a fundamental kind of haircut. I found that cutting Nils’ hair was not that much different from cutting Grandpa’s.