Living the Life

HANDS & HAIR

COLIN MACPHAIL

I always wanted short curly hair like Finlay Galbraith. Ours was straight. Mom liked our hair long and refused to give us a haircut after August. “It’ll help keep you warm for winter.” Wild shoulder-length hair was more likely to see you lose an eye in a November gale than incubate your ears. The West Coast of Scotland was pretty conservative, and my three brothers and I all had long hair, which made us odd. A farm wife once asked me if I was “Finlay’s girlfriend?” Luckily he was as mortified as I was, so it never came up again.

We didn’t have much leverage with our Mom because we lived 25 miles from the nearest barbershop, and my folks had no money for such an extravagance. When we got haircuts, the heavy silver scissors came out, and we sat in a chair outside the back door. The crisp rip of the blade through my hair is a distinctive sound that I forgot I missed till recently. When I went off to university in Edinburgh at 19, it was the first time anyone other than my mother had cut my hair. I went to a place in Tollcross called “Curl Up & Dye” because I thought it was clever. The haircuts were pedestrian. In Edinburgh, hairstyles spoke volumes about social status. I lamented never having the firm bouffant hair of the “chaps” who played “cricket and rugger.” Guys who looked at home in a scene from “Downtown Abbey” or “Brideshead Revisited.”

When we arrived in Calistoga, I started going to Richard’s small shop. It’s been years and years now. I go next door reasonably regularly too. Teresa has had a massage studio beside Richard’s for a long time. Both places are hidden behind the main street, so they are local haunts.

Teresa and Richard are oldtime Napa residents who spent their childhoods here. As a young girl, Teresa was given a horse and rode free on the open lands near Rutherford in the Western hills of Napa Valley. Richard was one of a large tribe, and he describes a feral upbringing where, as a young boy, he would take off into the hills of Knights Valley and spend all day fishing in the small creeks. Both Teresa and Richard are strong, self-sufficient personalities. They remain solid as wave after wave of lifestyle-seeking devotees washes up and around the edges of Napa like a rising surge in a tidal pool. Richard expounds on all aspects of life while you sit in his chair, and his language can get loud and salty. It’s a place where the allure is the recycling of tidbits, but you are aware that you may become subject matter too.

Next door, you lie on the couch and glimpse crystals nearby, with dream catchers on the walls, as soothing instrumentals play. Unlike Richard, Teresa’s hands work silently. What different paths these independent spirits chose. She heals with her hands, Richard offers vital social lubrication. He also quietly does a myriad of small good deeds for his older clientele. His gestures are a matter of fact, and he requires no accolades.

Occasionally as I lie almost dozing off in Teresa’s room, I can hear Richard’s muffled cursing on the other side of the wall. You can almost make out the conversation over the soothing sound of whales singing. Richard told me once that a lady who went to Teresa offered to pay Richard for an hour’s work if he would take a long lunch while she got a massage. He had some very choice words for that idea. I love that the walls are perennially thin in a small town.

Because of COVID 19, Sarah has been cutting the

Colin MacPhail

family hair outside our back door. It’s a surprisingly intimate ritual, and the bond it forms between us surmounts the guilt I feel about not having gone back to Richard’s yet. Sarah bought some clippers that have an impressive number of gaudy plastic attachments to shape your head. She trims my hair to have a silver rat in the middle of my head surrounded by two shallow inlets of pink skin. Every time, she very generously calls me her “silver fox,” so I like her bedside manner. It’s a short cut which is good. I still have hair envy when walking around Calistoga. The sturdy shock of silver-gray on the Branum twins, the handsome black luster of the Hispanic lads, Clive’s everlasting blondbrown, or the snow-white perfection of Tim Carl’s coiffe.

But I like my gray hair more than I ever have. Maybe that’s about being at peace with yourself and one of the good things about getting older.

Colin MacPhail is a wine consultant and writer who lives in Calistoga.