Crocked

The term "crockhead" was used by some of the townies in the small town near which I grew up to refer to Amish boys whose hair looked as if someone had turned a crock upside down on their heads and cut around the bottom edges. I hated being Amish; the crock haircuts being only one of the indignities we suffered because of our church's peculiar beliefs. When my parents and several of my aunts and uncles started talking about leaving the Amish when I was around 10 years old, my cousins and I would eagerly check our hair, after each haircut, for signs that we were getting rid of the dreaded crock look. Eventually my parents did leave the Amish church, and over the next 20 years, I thought my siblings and I (all of us well-educated and fashionably coiffed) were pretty much assimilated into general American society. Then we heard that a certain banker in the small town was still referring to us as "crockheads." When we weren't actually crockheads anymore, the term didn't have quite the same odious quality as when we were little boys, wishing that our family would fit in with the rest of American society, so we adopted the name for ourselves. So although the name belongs to all of our family, six boys and two girls, I have appropriated it for my particular blogging use.