A trip to get my hair cut these days certainly isn’t what it used to be many years ago. Many, many, many years ago.
This came to mind Saturday morning, when I was doing my absolute best to be productive. Attend men’s prayer breakfast at church? Check. Get the oil changed in the SUV? Check. Pick up new grill (joyously already assembled)? Check. Get hair cut? In the process.
All of that and it was only 10:30 a.m. That’s the liveliest morning I’ve had in many a moon.
There was something else on my list, and that was to accompany my wife to attend a play in Fort Wayne that afternoon. It hadn’t been done as of the time I stepped into the hair operation, but it had been planned.
Ah, the joy of setting an agenda
Anyway, when I was a wee lad years ago, the barber shop was just down the street from where I lived. My dad knew the guy who ran the shop. He knew what kind of haircut I was supposed to get. I would go by myself and when it was my turn, I’d get my ears lowered, to use the phrase my dad used for getting a haircut. I don’t remember if my parents trusted me with the money or if my dad would pay ahead of time, but there was a routine and I abided by that routine.
The barber shop would have magazines about sports and the barber, between snips, would engage me in my love of all things Cubs and playing Rookie Baseball and Rookie Basketball, depending on the season, at the YMCA.
So let’s fast-forward to Saturday morning. I’m sitting in a place where the people cutting the hair were all of one gender and the people getting their hair cut (no “ears lowered” here) were all of another gender.
I just found it … interesting.
“Here are five men and a boy waiting for one of three women to cut their hair,” I remarked to the guy next to me.
He didn’t seem to be interested in talking about it. “No other place to go,” I think he said, and I dropped the conversation.
That didn’t mean I stopped thinking about it.
A barber shop just kind of always seemed to be something that screamed “male enclave.” Guys went there to be … guys, I guess is the best way to put it. They’d talk about guy things and settle the problems of the world and then go back to whatever they do when they’re not getting their hair cut. Not everybody, however, There’d always be the same two or three guys sitting in one of the chairs set out for waiting. They were probably retired chaps would would let you know what they thought about a variety of topics. Sports, most likely, was one of those topics.
When my name was called Saturday morning, I sat down in the chair. My hair-cutting person (is she a barber? I don’t know) and I talked about my recent trip to Indianapolis with my wife, son, and grandson, and my plans for the day, and this and that. Nothing about sports. Nothing about the problems of the day. Just about … stuff.
Fascinating.
I remember a few years ago my wife and I wandered into a facility like I was in Saturday morning and the two of us had our hair taken care of side-by-side. If the boy who sat in that barber chair that many years ago had ever thought he would be doing that, he would have been laughed out of the shop.
Times have certainly changed.
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Goodbye to a friend: Abide me a point of personal privilege here, but I must mention my friend Jan Elliott. She died May 6 at the age of 76.
Jan was one of those people who is both a blessing and a bane to people like me. She always had an opinion about what ought to be in the newspaper and wanted to make sure I knew about it. She had lived in Bluffton much, much longer than I had, and I usually found her insights valuable.
The is how I described the lady: “Jan always had an opinion, and she was one of very few people that you actually wanted to know what her opinion was.”
I will miss her. I look forward to seeing her again.
daves@news-banner.com
