It's always the small things that trigger this odd memory of mine. This evening, it was an article on the nasty happenings in Kosovo. Reading though the names in the article made me think of Penny.

The town I grew up in was a small farming community settled mostly by Germans and Norwegians. We had our share of Kanters, and Meullers, and Johnsons. Some families, however, had more ethnic names. Dirk Pensczeviwicz was from one of those families.

Despite being of solid Czech stock, this young man was not blessed with the slavic build. He was, well, somewhat skinny. A good kid, but not exactly the Charles Atlas type. Looking at this kid, none of the rest of us could, in good conscience, call him "Dirk". And, outside of his family, only about 6 people in the whole town could pronounce Pensczeviwicz. So...he became "Penny". He was smart enough not to fight it. He knew that there were much worse things we could peg him with.

Well, as we grew, Penny became an integral part of "the group". He was pretty quite most of the time, but otherwise fit in okay. When we reached junior high, Penny hit that magic age. Well, among the other changes, the skinny kid gained a little weight. Not much, but enough that he no longer looked like a juvenile Iccabod Crane.

He got involved in sports, wrestling, track. He ended up looking pretty tough. He was, however, stuck with the name Penny. We still couldn't call him "Dirk" without laughing.

Aside from a well-muscled build, the Czechs (as with most Slavic types) are noted for thick hair. Well, this was one point on which Mother Nature didn't deprive him of his heritage. Penny's hair was like steel wool. We were always surprised he could get a comb through it.

The summer before our senior year we had a bit of a hot spell. Temperatures hovered in the high 90's, and the humidity wasn't much lower. Crew cuts suddenly became a fashionable hairstyle. Penny was cooking. His hair was like a thick-knit wool cap. I don't know how he stood it.

After about 2 weeks, though, he couldn't stand it. Like so many of the high-school students, Penny had a job de-tasseling corn. (That's where the tassels on the corn are removed so that the pure strains don't cross-fertilize. The local seed companies hired kids to do the job for minimum wage. Later in the summer, they'd pick tobacco or work the corn-pack and pea-pack at the canning factory.

Anyway, Penny was sweating buckets under all that hair. Being the way he was, he decided that a crew-cut just wasn't going to be good enough. He went over to John's house, borrowed the sheep-shears and cut his hair down to nothing. Then he headed home and burned out 3 razors shaving his head down to a cue-ball smoothness. He looked a bit funny, but it would definitely keep him cooler.

There was one problem which he didn't think about. Having always had that thick hair, Penny never got into the habit of wearing a hat. I saw him the following night. He stopped by the restaurant where I worked with the rest of the gang. I gasped when I saw him. His head--having not seen the sun since he was about 3 months old, was burned. Severely burned. Someone had loaned him a hat after the first couple hours, but the damage was done.

I didn't know what to say. I just stood there looking at this poor boy. Finally, I turned to the rest of the gang. "Guys, we should have known this, we should have seen it coming. We've been warned about this all our lives." They looked at me weird. "Huh?" "Oh, come on, guys. How many times have your dads said it to you: A Penny shaved is a Penny burned!"