smokerblog

One Man's Coiffure

There's this guy I've seen every night on my way home from work^* for the past week or two. He's always either wandering about in his yard, standing on the sidewalk watching traffic, or tending to the few hostas and lilies that surround his home. His well-tanned features seem to be those of a well-preserved 70-yr-old or a prematurely aging 50-yr-old, I can't tell.

He's somewhat short and squat in the way that some people might describe as having come from sturdy, European peasant stock, which he does seem to have a Italian or Greek or, what, a Gascon air about him or something. Plus, he seems to share the immigrant's habit of always wearing wool or polyester trousers with a tight-fitting polo shirt or, when the weather is particularly hot, just his v-neck t-shirt, as if jeans or shorts would kill him.

But the feature that stands out, heck, from a first-impression standpoint it practically defines him: his hair. And it's not really the hair itself, which is always formed into a perfect helmet of a pompadour. It's the color of his hair.

It's black.

As in, really black. Blacker than black. Jet. Coal. Pitch. These modifiers barely scratch the surface of the blackness that exists in this man's hair. There is no shimmer, no sheen, no highlights or lowlights, only no lights. Light just falls into this hair and does not escape. I'm even questioning at this point whether this guy is coloring his hair. I doubt that science has progressed to a point where we can produce a color (or rather, the total and utter absence of color) like this in the lab. A black this black can only exist as some sort of freak of nature.

Not that I think this guy is a freak or anything. It's just his hair.