On a Thursday morning in May, in a small barber shop on Quinpool Road in Halifax, Aurelio Ferreira-Rao had his first haircut. He was thirteen months and one week old. He cried for the first ninety seconds and then fell asleep against his father's shoulder.
The barber shop, Joaquim's, has been at the same address since 1979. The owner, Joaquim Cordeiro, came to Halifax from the Azores when he was nineteen and has cut, by his own estimate, somewhere between forty and fifty thousand heads of hair. He has done a fair number of first haircuts.
Aurelio's first haircut had been postponed twice. Once because his mother, Priya Rao, had decided he was not ready. Once because the city was in a January cold snap and the idea of taking a baby out into minus eighteen for a vanity errand had felt wrong.
By May, his hair had reached his eyebrows. It curled, in the back, around the top of his ears. It looked, his grandmother had said on a video call from Mumbai, like a small dark cloud.
The first-haircut ritual is one of those small thresholds that no one really decides on a position about until they are at it. Some families wait until the second birthday. Some wait until the hair gets in the food. Some keep the first lock in a small envelope and some throw it away with the rest of the cut hair.
Joaquim, asked his opinion, said: the right time is when the hair is in the eyes. He said this without ceremony. He had heard the question, he implied, a great many times.
Priya and her husband, Rafael Ferreira, had decided, the night before, that they would keep a small curl. They had brought a small ziplock bag from the kitchen drawer.
The morning of the haircut, Rafael carried Aurelio in. The shop smelled of talcum powder and the particular sweet cedar of the aftershave Joaquim has used for decades. Three older men were in the chairs. One was being shaved with a straight razor. The other two were having what appeared to be the same conversation they had been having on previous Thursdays.
Joaquim greeted the baby with a small bow. He has a way of greeting babies that does not involve looking at them directly, which, he had explained to Priya on the phone, frightens them less.
He showed Aurelio the clippers, switched off. He let Aurelio touch them. The clippers were heavier than the baby had expected, and he laughed.
Then Rafael sat down in the chair with Aurelio on his lap. Joaquim draped a small towel around the baby's neck. He clicked the clippers on. They made the low buzz that, to an adult, is just a sound, and to a thirteen-month-old, is the start of an emergency.
Aurelio cried. He cried with the full open-mouthed grief of a baby who has been betrayed by the people who love him. He cried for, by Priya's count on her phone, ninety-one seconds.
Joaquim did not stop. He had done this before. He worked quickly. He took the back first, then the sides, then trimmed the front with a small pair of scissors. He never touched the very top.
The very top, he had told Priya, is for the second haircut. The first haircut is just clearing the eyes.
Halfway through the second minute, Aurelio stopped crying. The buzz, it seemed, had become merely a fact. He looked at his reflection in the long mirror across the shop with the considering frown of a person seeing himself for the first time.
By the third minute, he had put his head down on his father's shoulder and closed his eyes.
By the fourth minute, Joaquim was done.
He brushed the cut hair off the towel onto the floor. He picked up, with two fingers, a small dark curl from the side, and placed it in the ziplock bag Priya was holding open. He did this with the seriousness of a man placing a coin in a collection.
Then he held out a small lollipop, which Priya intercepted, smiling, and put in her pocket for later.
The haircut cost twelve dollars. Rafael tipped twenty. Joaquim did not protest.
Outside on Quinpool Road, the sun was bright. Aurelio, now awake, sat in his stroller and touched, with his small hand, the back of his own neck. There was a strangeness there, a coolness that had not been there an hour earlier.
He made a small puzzled sound. Then he looked up at his mother, and she said, you got a haircut, baby. He repeated, in the way thirteen-month-olds do, the last word of the sentence, approximately: cuh.
The ziplock bag is, as of this writing, in the small drawer of Priya's bedside table. She does not have a plan for it. She does not, she has said, need one. It is enough, for now, that it is there. The hair will grow back. The first one is in a bag.
