My head is much smaller than I remembered. I go long between haircuts in these dread latter years; it is difficult to find the time. The sad result of this regimen is that I forget the size of my own head, and spend days startling at the stranger in the mirror.
The problem is stubbornness. I have been going to the same barbers since the age of seven; to find new barbers at this late date would be like changing my name. In a strip mall not far from the commuter train, five Sicilians keep a bright, clean shop with the particolored pole; there used to be six, but John died five years ago. (Requiescat in pace; he was a good barber.) Redskins posters, a taxidermied swordfish, a map of Sicily, an American flag, a couple T.V.s playing The Price Is Right or a Western: the place hasn’t changed in a quarter century, and I pray it never will—a shining eyeful of exemplary, gleaming, wholesome America.
The barbers remember me, too, although these days they note with some disapproval that I visit less frequently than before. They ask where my brother is; they ask about the time I was on a high-school T.V. quiz show. (My local celebrity is not likely to go to my head.) The haircut itself is the height of refinement, a precision affair concluded with a neck-shave by straight-razor. Long practice has revealed that there is a right way to do these things. There is something unfamiliar about this sort of familiarity; the greater Washington area is a hive of well-off transients, coming from Ohio or New Jersey to work for Leviathan or its attendants and then returning home. Going to the same barbers who cut your hair in grade school must be a glimpse of what it’s like to be at home in other places.
But time moves; as I listened to Joe talk about his grandchildren, I worried about the day these champions of civilization retire. For one thing, I have had only four haircuts outside this refuge in the past twenty-three years. (Even these fill me with a sense of traitorous guilt.) The first was performed by my mother at the kitchen table on my first Christmas break in college; I had been ill and unable to leave the house, so I received the same squarish number my late father got. It is for me a somewhat gloomy memory; I doubt, for her part, that she is raring to revive her skills.
The second was performed at the barbershop of an ancient hamlet in the Manisa province of Turkey. My workmen had been ridiculing my long hair—“Hair of a girl!” Murat helpfully explained in his Turco-Germano-English—so I had to shuffle down to the lower village, where a kinsman of our cook (and probably other workers, too—they were all kinsmen) cut me down to size. I stared at a poster of the Kaaba and drank tea; the result was so convincingly Turkish, along with my complexion and bearing, that little boys in the market town would refuse to believe I was unable to speak fluently, and I was taken to the special T.S.A. line on my return to America. My current barbers are far from my highland fastness north of Baltimore, but the hills of golden Lydia are farther.
The third off-reservation barberation was from a pleasant, young Jewish Uzbek on Second Avenue in New York; I had him shave off my mustache as well. In one of those inexplicable outbursts of pure perversity, I told him I had been recently married and my wife was already expecting a child. To return and elaborate on these amiable, enthusiastic lies was (and is) unbearable. The next time I absolutely required a haircut in New York, immediately before my actual wedding, I went to an effete Italian in Greenwich Village; his treatment was, I am afraid, simply not very good, and more than twice what I am used to spending. The New York barbering experience is right out.
It will probably not be a problem for another twenty-five years, but I see it coming, this crisis of hair-cutting. There is an anecdote or legend about a particular college at Oxford whose refectory roof was held by great timber rafters; some centuries after the refectory’s construction, the trustees observed that the rafters were deteriorating and would soon need to be replaced, but the great woods of England had long since been cut down. With trepidation, they presented their predicament to the college’s groundskeeper, who replied, We’ve been expecting you to ask, and showed them where the building generation had planted trees on college property in anticipation of the day. Has anyone thought to cultivate good barbers? In what secluded park are they to be sought?
Which brings me to another question: what if my dentist retires?
