The other day I went to see my barber. I don’t know her name. I usually just go in, sit down, and chat while she cuts my hair. I pay her cash that includes a small tip, say “see ya later,” and leave. Occasionally I see her at the grocery store. Since I don’t know her name, I just say, “Hi, how’s it going,” and “How’s your son,” (I don’t know his name either.) But on this day, I happened to mention that my son, Ian, had moved to town a few weeks before. “I recommended Ian to you. He said that he had been in a couple of times.”
“Really? What’s he look like? We don’t always know what peoples’ names are unless they tell us,” she said.
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“He gets his hair cut military style on the sides. He’s about six foot tall, dark hair, and if he was wearing short sleeves when he came in, you’d recognize him by his tattoos on his arms.” I was really proud about how I was able to describe my son of 32 years. My memory was impeccable.
“What kind of tattoos?”
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Dang, I couldn’t remember. “Hmmm, I think one of them is a dragon.”
“Oh! You’re talking about Dragon Boy. We wondered what his name was. So he’s your son?”
“Yes,” I replied. Dragon Boy?
I must have had a puzzled look on my face because what’s-her-name, the barber said, “We usually give nicknames to our customers when we don’t know their real ones. That way we can know who we’re talking about.”
By “we” she was talking about the other woman that cut hair in the shop. I don’t know what her name is either. I just referred to the two barbers as “the one in the front” and “the one in the back” when I told Dragon Boy about the barbershop and who to ask for.
Suddenly, it dawned on me that my barber, “the one in the back,” probably didn’t know my name! I didn’t remember ever introducing myself. I’d been coming in there for five years and I didn’t remember her ever calling me by name. Uh oh. What nickname had she been calling me? The curly white-headed fat guy?
I quickly scanned around the mirror in front of me. Nearly obscured among all the pictures of her grandson (whatever his name is) was a name! Kathy... or Karen. I think it began with the letter K. I called her by name, “...my name is Dan Case. Did I ever introduce myself?”
“Great! I’m glad to know your name, Dan,” she said.
I frowned. “So, you didn’t know my name before?”
“No.”
I hesitated. “So do you have a nickname for me?”
“Yeah, Bigfoot.”
“Bigfoot?” My eyes quickly moved to my average sized feet. What did that mean? You wouldn’t consider me to be hairy, or tall, or... did I have body odor?
“Sure,” she said. “We’ve been calling you that ever since you told me about your trip to find Bigfoot.”
Realization set in. I had told her about a research trip that author Charles W. Sasser and I took the year before to examine locations of Sasquatch sightings and interview people for a book and magazine articles we were doing about the Bigfoot phenomena.
“Oh.” Was all I could think of in reply.
After she had cut my hair and I was paying her, I said, “Don’t forget now, my name is Dan Case.” I was determined to say my name more than once each time I came in. Somehow I had to rid myself of the “Bigfoot” nickname.
“As I got in my truck, a thought struck me. “Bigfoot” wasn’t such a bad nickname. It could have been much worse. I do remember telling “the one in the back” about my interview with Bob (I think that was his name), the guy that makes his living cleaning out septic tanks.