Crying at Hair Cuttery

I do not set out to write about cats. When I create a mind map for an essay, there is no “Cats?” bubble reminding me to shoehorn one or two of them into my writing. Cats just appear organically, the way they do in virtual meetings and Haruki Murakami novels. So, I have at least one thing in common with Haruki Murakami. Unfortunately, it is not fat royalty checks for bestselling novels. It seems that completing a novel is a non-negotiable prerequisite for being a bestselling novelist and collecting royalty checks (or direct deposits) from a publisher.

This morning, I set out to write about last week’s trip to Washington, DC, for my son’s graduation from the MD program at The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. For about a year now, I have been finding ways to slip the event into every conversation: “Eggs are $100 a dozen? I sure hope they get cheaper before I travel to DC for my son’s MEDICAL SCHOOL GRADUATION.” A few people, the second or third or fiftieth time around, probably wished I had taken up CrossFit, so they could hear about that instead.

The trip to Washington, DC (Did I mention it was for my son’s medical school graduation?), began when my wife and I rolled two large and two carry-on suitcases down the driveway to meet our 02:45 a.m. Uber/Lyft¹ to the Minot International Airport. The driver kindly got out of his car to help with our bags but explained that there was no room for luggage in the trunk. “We can put bags on the passenger seat,” he said, “but I’ll have to move the cat.”

The cat was orange and appeared to be one or two years old. He was swaddled in a towel and looking around like this was all as surreal to him as it was to me.² If he could have talked, he probably would have said that he felt like he was living in a scene from a Murakami novel. The talking cat would have seemed no more unreal to me than a driver for hire showing up for an airport run with no trunk space and an orange cat wrapped in a towel on the passenger seat. Also, I think it is safe to assume that all talking cats read Murakami novels.

The driver put Puss in Towel on his lap, and I stacked the small suitcases on the passenger seat. Then my wife and I wedged ourselves into the back seat with the large suitcases between us. During the fifteen-minute drive to the airport, the driver said that he had only recently moved to North Dakota and asked if we knew a good veterinarian in Minot, because he lived fifty miles away and took his dog all the way to Bismarck—two hours in another direction—for veterinary care. His dog, he explained, had attacked the cat, and now the cat’s back legs weren’t working right. Whether it was his cat or just some random cat that crossed his dog’s path was unclear and way less concerning than the ugly scraping sound the brakes made at each turn and stoplight as we sat with our butts against the doors, the seat-belt buckles buried beneath our suitcases, and an orange cat between the driver and his airbag.

We told the driver that we hadn’t been able to find a veterinarian in Minot who would take new clients, so we took our pets to Towner, 45 miles east of Minot and at least an hour closer to the driver’s home than any veterinary clinic in Bismarck. That was good news for him, and he thanked us as the car came to a stop in front of the terminal with the sound of an anvil being dragged over concrete.

As we walked to the terminal, my wife asked, “What the heck was that?” Then she gave the man a nice tip on the Uber/Lyft app to help with the veterinary bills and new brakes.

“As George W. Bush said after Trump’s first inaugural address, ‘that was some weird shit,’” I said. “I’m sure the rest of our trip will be smooth as silk in comparison. We’re flying into DCA: What could go wrong?”

Even with Sean Duffy at the helm of the Department of Transportation, we arrived safely in Washington, DC, and drove to our first-ever Airbnb, located on a quiet street a few blocks from the George Washington Parkway in Alexandria, Virginia. The basement space we rented was well-furnished and wonderfully dark for sleeping, so we were quite fresh and energetic when we ventured off to Trader Joe’s—nonexistent in North Dakota—for some groceries. Our plan was to save money by preparing our own meals instead of going to restaurants two or three times a day. While my wife cooked, I could write and even connect to the Wi-Fi to publish a newsletter or two. I could also complete my Memorial Day speeches for the two days after our return to Minot, because nothing stresses my wife out as much as her husband’s last-minute speech writing.³

The next night, we drove to my son’s place in the District for an informal dinner party to celebrate his impending graduation. A strong thunderstorm blew through before things kicked off, but it didn’t interfere with the party, which featured barbecue dishes, my son’s homemade greens, and roughly half of his friends bringing the same gift: a large bottle of vodka. Before we declined an invitation to attend the after-party pub crawl and headed back to Alexandria, my wife got a message saying that the power was out at our Airbnb.

The storms that rolled through Alexandria were monsters compared to the one that we had seen in DC. The drive home was a dark maze of detours. An uprooted tree lay perpendicularly across one end of the street where we were staying as if it had been purposely felled there as an obstacle. On the other end of the street, we drove around branches and under power lines that slanted down to where a branch pinned them to the ground. It was a dark mini-adventure for us, but falling trees had killed two people in their cars that evening, one of them less than a mile from our location.

A farm girl and a Marine can handle a day without power, of course, but 48 hours right before a graduation ceremony was uncomfortable. The darkness of our lodging was less wonderful when it was involuntary, and the toilet picked a horrible time to clog. The morning of my son’s graduation, we found a shopping plaza with power and charged our computers, phones, and bloodstreams at a coffee shop. The plaza had a Hair Cuttery, which was a huge relief, because Farm Girl was okay with slopping hogs or vaccinating ducks, but not having power to fix her hair for the graduation ceremony was a privation she would not accept.

My wife returned to the coffee shop with clean hair that looked perfectly fine to me. She didn’t particularly like the cut but gave the stylist a nice tip, because that’s what you do when they ask you how you’re doing and you burst into tears before they have even had a chance to ruin your hair, I guess.⁴

Hair Cuttery therapy seems to have worked. Mrs. Hammer was fine through the graduation and promotion ceremonies. She made friends at the celebration dinner, where there may have been some additional tequila therapy. (Farm Girl is not the box-wine type. That would be an insult to her moonshine-running ancestors.)

Apparently, the ladies at hair-salon group therapy decided it would be a good idea to cut the vacation a couple days short as a buffer against unforeseen natural or unnatural disasters. Everything comes in threes, they said, after my wife told them about Puss in Towel and my daughter’s dog, Cookie, who had arrived at the airport two days earlier with blood of uncertain origin all over her crate, as if she had been sacrificing chickens in there all the way from Seattle to Baltimore-Washington International Airport.⁵

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The ticket change was free, and it was nice to get home with a couple of days to procrastinate writing my speeches.

The cats were so happy to see us.