I finally broke down and did it last night. I trimmed my eyebrows.
It's an admission of aging. Hair may grow sparser, especially on top ? not me yet, thank heavens ? but it gets longer and coarser as we approach geezerhood. After the nose hair started to sprout in earnest, and the hair in my ears turned all bristly, I suppose eyebrows were the next logical step. But I wasn't even aware there was a problem until a few months ago, when my new barber asked if he should trim my eyebrows while he was at it.
Rr? Eyebrows? Why would anyone bother cutting eyebrows? No thanks. I've always had long eyebrow hair; using a fingertip, I could press it down to prick my eyeball since I was a teenager. (The overhanging brow helps, of course.) At the time, I figured the barber just didn't recognize I've always looked this way, and I feared I would look odd if he fiddled with them.
But I got self-conscious. I started checking them in the mirror, and had to admit they are longer than they used to be. The tips snag in the skin of my forehead, raising the brows in shaggy arches. If I greased them, I'd look like Eddie Munster. If they were gray, I'd look like Mr. Venske, my seventh grade science teacher.
Or my grandfather.
Grampa Roth left me with three legacies, it seems. Grampa was a curmudgeon's curmudgeon, and so am I; that's old news. He was a hermit, too, and I've been turning into one for several years. The eyebrows are news. It's all downhill from here, I suppose: turning into a sour old man in brown corduroy. I hate corduroy. Demanding brightly-lit restaurants. Refusing to listen to the doctor. I feel like Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein, thrashing about in nightmare, chanting, ?Destiny! Destiny! No escaping, that's for me!?
But not just yet. Not so long as I have this pair of scissors, my trusty blade to fight off the ravages of time for a little while.