You Can't Brush What's Not There.

Back when I was in high school I began to lose my hair - no obvious (none of my relatives has a history of early hair loss) reason for it. Nick, my barber, told me one day that if I cut it really short, like under an inch, it would appear as if I had more total hair on my head. This revelation, as most optical illusions do, had some merit. Let me tell you a little bit more about Nick. He was this 50 year old Italian import with greasy hair and weighed-down with an abundance of gold jewellery, and short - 5'2" would have been a dream for him. He owned this little barber shop/hair styling place in a crappy mall and drove a corvette which he exchanged every two years for a new one.

Coincident with the short, greasy, Italian-guy stereotype, he always had a lot of women around -- seemed to be dating a new one every week. He only allowed women to work for him and think most of them were, ahem, 'professionals' before they were hair stylists. If Nick wasn't getting hummers in the backroom on a daily basis then I'm shocked. All that said, Nick was a great guy, he had great insight into the human condition and I learned a lot about people from him. Come to think of it, one of my sisters worked for Nick for a while. She got fired - perhaps she wasn't providing the requisite employer benefit...

Actually, I got fired from a job in that mall too. I used to work at the shoe repair shop for a guy name Dan. It was one of the best jobs I ever had because job satisfaction was easily obtained. Each day had it's own reward -- plus, you got to work with lots of really strong glue...for hours on end. I went home happy every day. Why did I get terminated? I had this tendency to stay out really late with friends and then, umm, forget to wake up in the morning to open the store. On day I woke up an hour after I was supposed to have opened the store, flew (FLEW) through my house and down to the mall only to discover that the shoe store across the aisle from us had called Dan and he was already in and working. He was mad, so mad I thought for sure he was going to hit me, and he was a really bit guy. Did I mention that shoe repair gives you gargantuan upper-body strength? No, well it does, and he'd been doing it for 30 years. The actual termination was somewhat anticlimactic based on that original fear.

Three months later I started with Canadian Tire, as a cashier, as the only male cashier my store employed (and, come to think of it, I have never seen or hired a male cashier in any of my 4 stores since). It occurred to me last week that I have been with Canadian Tire for 14 years now. 14 years.

I still stop in to see Dan at the shoe repair shop everytime I'm in Whitby. You see, I'm quite thankful to him for firing me. If he hadn't I may never have made a connection with Canadian Tire. I make no bones about the fact that he terminated me illegally - at least by Ontario's standards. I was too young at the time to really know otherwise, but he didn't have grounds. I have however, over the years, make sure he knows all of the successes that I've had with Canadian Tire over the years. You know, managing large 20 million dollar stores and such. There's a certain satisfaction in that.

Anyway, 15 years ago Nick told me that if I cut my hair to shorter than an inch all around, I wouldn't look as if I'd lost so much. I don't actually know about the truth of that, but I'll tell you, it leads to 'maintenance free hair'. Yesterday it all got lopped off. You can't brush what's not there!