Sleeping with Strangers

Math Man likes a no-fuss haircut. If he can't hop out of bed with perfect hair, then it's grown too long and he needs a cut. After his last cut, he came home full of angst over whether he should have gone with a number 1 razor. I asked him why he bothered dithering between number 2 and 1 and didn't just shave it all off. I have an alarming sarcastic streak that comes out when I hear that he pays perhaps a third of what I pay to get his hair done.

Yesterday when I came home I found that he had done exactly that. I went halfway up the stairs to the second floor, saw him standing at the top of the stairway, and stopped cold. I knew my jaw had fallen to the landing, but I was powerless to do anything except stand there and stupidly stare. I may have said something witty like, "Oh, my God." I don't remember now.

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I've wondered for several decades now if I'm somehow deficient in facial recognition. Watching back episodes of "Law and Order" hasn't helped this worriment any. On television the witness sees the perp for perhaps ten seconds, but can accurately pick him out of a line-up composed of several of the accused's identical twins.

Me? I've been working with people at my current job for over seven years, and still don't recognize them if I run into them in the supermarket. It's been an embarrassment on a number of occasions.

I have no trouble remembering people in context. Stick these same people I don't know at the supermarket back into the workplace, give them white coats, eye protectors and head coverings, and I�d know them instantly.

But take these people out of the white coats and stick them in the company cafeteria half-an-hour before their lunch time - they'll look familiar, but I may not actually know who they are until I hear their voices. Then take these same folk and put them outside the work environment altogether and I have no clue who they are, even if they come up and speak to me.

I've been this way all my life. Fellow students, teachers, members of the same organization, friends of the family: it's always the same. If you take them out of the context I met and got to know them in, I'll have no clue who they are. Indeed, I have this niggling little fear in the back of my head that some day I'll be the only witness to a major crime (or, heaven forefend, the victim myself) and I'll be completely unable to pick out who the criminal is, even if I got a good look at their face. Whatever it takes to remember faces, it just isn't hardwired into my brain.

It's probably why I like the Internet so much. Everybody has to identify themselves every time they say something.

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Which brings me back to me, standing slack-jawed on the stairway landing, looking at Math Man doing his impression of Jean Luc Picard. I didn't recognize him. I don't recognize him. He's unrecognizable. Apparently I've been dependent upon his hair to cue me in on who he is. It's going to take me days now to relearn how to recognize him. I've got no real complaints with the cue ball look he now sports (except that for some reason he now looks about ten years younger than he did with hair). It's just that I'm going to have to learn who the hell he is all over again.

I hate when stuff like this happens.