Haircuts and Memories

The weather is hot here in central Alabama, and lately the Redhead has been hinting (well, nagging really) that it’s time to get my “summer” haircut. The summer haircut is an old southern tradition in which men get their hair cut a little shorter than usual for the summer months. In my case, it’s not going to make a lot of difference, because every passing summer leaves me with a little less hair to worry about.

The summer haircut brings back old memories. I hated haircuts as a child. Funny how the passing of the years turns such memories into soft-edged nostalgia.

My dad always took me to a downtown barbershop in Sylacauga back in the late 1960’s, which I believe was located on one of the side streets between Broadway and Norton. This shop was a real man’s haven: three big leather-clad barber chairs, black and white checkered tile floors, and mirrors on the back wall. Other walls adorned with mounted deer heads and a largemouth bass or two, along with an auto parts store calendar featuring a pin-up girl (scantily clad in the latest one-piece bathing suit). In one corner, an old glass-front cabinet filled with creams and tonics that every man needed to keep his coiffure under control. Metal chairs with vinyl cushions lined the waiting area. One or more conversations taking place at all times, usually about football, problems at the mill, or the latest frustrations rebuilding a small block 350 engine. Plenty to read while you waited: Field and StreamPopular Mechanics, and the current edition of the local newspaper, The Daily Home. An old AM radio on the counter, playing good country or gospel music. Depending on the time of day, you might even hear old L.R. Ross tell you what great merchandise was available for sale or trade on the “Shop and Swap” segment on W.F.E.B.:

“Neighbors, we have a man who’d like to trade a real nice goat for a single-shot 12 gauge shotgun. If you have a gun you’d like to trade, please call…”

I can still smell the witch hazel and talcum powder.

Although there were three chairs, I only remember one being used. The barber was old Mr. Mallory. As a little boy, it seemed quite possible to me that he had probably given Moses his first hair cut. Mr. Mallory wore glasses that had lenses as thick as the bottom of an old green glass coke bottle, and the end of his nose was always about an inch from your head while he worked his magic.

Mr. Mallory always asked “How you want it?” The answer never mattered. You might “want it” like Elvis, but you “got it” in a style called “flat top.” I believe it was the cut he liked best. But it was the haircut for the small town southern gentleman at that time. I was always just relieved to leave the chair with both ears still attached. If I didn’t squirm too much during the whole ordeal, I’d get a piece of Bazooka bubble gum as a reward.

Times sure have changed.

The place I go these days for a haircut is a “style shop.” The customers are both men and women, although the barbers are all now called stylist and are exclusively female. The walls are pastel and there are flower arrangements. Something soothing and “New Age” plays on the sound system. The place smells of bleaching chemicals and potpourri. There is no Field and Stream, though if you look hard enough you might find a copy of Time or National Review. The last time I went, the receptionist asked me if I wanted a warm cookie.

My stylist is blond and attractive. She tries to engage me with conversation about American Idol or Dancing with the Stars, but it is to no avail. I have never watched either. Confident that my ears will survive intact, I usually have to fight the urge not to doze off while she works. She always asks if I would like a little mousse or styling gel before I leave. I always decline. As Eastwood said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

She and her coworkers are trained psychologists. They tell me how good I look–how my gray hair makes me looked “distinguished.” I am aware that I am being worked for return visits, like a young, pretty waitress works a middle-aged man for a bigger tip.

I’ll admit she does a good job with the little bit of hair she has to work with. But for her skills, she charges a fee that would have probably made Mr. Mallory decide to close up early and take the rest of the day off.

Manhood still barely intact, I leave knowing I’ll have to return in a month or so. I feel a strange urge to go rebuild a small block 350 engine or shoot an animal.

Maybe times haven’t changed all that much over the years.

I still hate haircuts.

This post originally appeared here in 2010.  

The Lunatic

The lunatic sits under the firmament, waiting for the appointed time.

Tonight, both sides of the moon dark.  A blood-moon.  Blood cries from sky as well as the ground.

In a little patch of pasture grass between stands of pine, darkness falls slowly then all at once.  Thunder off to the northwest, air heavy but cool.  Sky thick with clouds.

The first lightning-bugs of the year hover along the tree line.  A visage that once meant empty pickle jars with hole-poked lids.  Remembered days of daisy chains and laughs.  Does it mean anything now?

We are refugees from Babel.  Once sky-gazers, mumbling in strange tongues.  Huddled by fires against the darkness outside animal-skinned shelters.  Looking for a sign from the sky.  Now screen-gazers huddled inside, forsaking all but strange truths.

The appointed time passes, and the clouds will not part. 

The Book says “A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign.”

The bulldog sighs. 

“Okay,” I say.  “Let’s go to bed.”

The Old Man, the Chihuahua, and Jesus in the Woods

Back in my younger days I bought a tract of timber from an old man.

As a side note and for your education in the intricacies of forestry parlance, anyone associated with the timber business refers to a parcel of wooded land as a “tract,” as in “that’s a nice tract of wood.”  It is pronounced “track,” and I suspect a good many of them would spell it that way.

But I digress. Reckon I got off tract.

I had just moved a logger onto the tract when the owner drove up.  He was an old man dressed in old man work clothes:  khaki pants, matching khaki shirt, red and black plaid hunting jacket, and a cap with ear flaps.  Looked like he might have just stepped off the cover of a 1957 edition of Outdoor Life.  His car was also from the ’50’s, a Rambler I believe, and it was as neat as the creases on those khaki pants.  I initially thought “bless his heart, this poor fellow has come today because this land is dear to him.  He probably inherited it from his father, who managed to scrape up enough share-cropper dollars to buy it just before the Great Depression.  Now he wants to take a last look at the trees he and his poor old daddy planted together right after he got home from the Big War across pond.”

I would later discover that he owned a couple of thousand acres of land and had more money than Carter had little pills (Google it, youngsters).  I have more imagination than sense sometimes.

He motioned me over to the passenger window.  “Hop in, young fellow, I want to show you some things before you get started.”

Now at this point in the story I should mention that there was a chihuahua in the back seat of the Rambler, who looked to be about as old as the man (in dog years, of course).  I should also mention that he was in a rage, barking and snarling and flinging himself against the rear passenger window.

I am not a person who has any fear of dogs.  But I do have a healthy respect for a snarling one with a murderous look in his bugged-out eyes, even if he does weigh 15 pounds and barks with a Mexican accent.

I hesitated.  “Is your dog going to bite me?”

“No, son, get in.  Jasper, hush that up now, you hear.”

Jasper was apparently bilingual, as he did calm down slightly.  But as soon as I got in he jumped to the top of the front seat, where he hunkered-down facing me.

We rode around in that Rambler for twenty minutes as the old man pointed to this and that.  We bounced down roads and pig-trails that I wouldn’t have attempted in a four-wheel drive pickup.

I said “Yes sir” a lot, but my eyes were straight ahead and I was trying not to flinch.  That chihuahua’s nose was one-inch from my cheek, and he was growling the entire time — one of those breathing, inhale/exhale growls.  I knew if I made one move my left ear was gone.  I was focused.

We eventually made it back, my face still intact.

The next day I called the logger to see how things were going.  “This is some good wood” (more forestry parlance), “but I’m afraid we’re going to accidentally kill that old man.  He stays out here all the time watching us work.  We’ve had several close calls.  He just appears out of thin air beside the machines.  I almost cut a tree down on him this morning.”

I promised I would come by the next morning and talk to him about the dangers of logging equipment.  Make sure he understood.

Let me digress again and tell you a little about this logger.  Tony had found Jesus at a Pentecostal tent revival a couple of months before, and he was as excited and sincere about his new-found faith as any man I had ever met.  Within a week, his entire crew had joined the flock as a result of his preaching.  Tony had invited me to his church, the “West Georgia Assembly of Signs Following,” where the Spirit was working.  People were speaking in unknown tongues, being healed of various afflictions, and sometimes were “Slain in the Spirit.”  No timber rattlers were being passed around, so I guess all the signs following were not yet on display.*

Once Tony asked me if I had ever been Slain in the Spirit.

I said I didn’t think I had.

“Well, you ought to come to one of our Saturday night services.  It happened to me a couple of weeks ago.  It was like being hit by a bolt of lightning.  Knocked me slam out of my shoes.”

I smiled and nodded.  Didn’t say anything.  Never had any desire to be struck by lightning.  Try to avoid it most days.

Back to the story.  The next day I came out to talk to the old man, but he was nowhere to be found.

I stopped Tony and asked if he had been out to the job that morning.

“Oh yes, he left about an hour ago.  I asked him if he knew Jesus, and he said ‘No, I don’t want any part of religion,’ so I radioed all my men and got them to come in.  We formed a circle around him and prayed for his eyes to be opened by the Spirit, but he just jumped in his car and left.”

Funny thing, we never saw that old man again.

Probably just afraid of lightning.

 

* The Bible, Mark 16:17-18.

This piece first posted in 2016.

The One that Got Away

I know where I am, but I am not sure how I got here.

I am about a half-mile south of Mitchell Dam in Coosa County.  The bridge on Alabama 22 is half again as far away.  Nothing much on that highway but trees on either side.  Forests that would swallow it without a trace in a few years without human intervention.   You break down anywhere on that stretch between Rockford and Verbena and you better pray that you can flag down the occasional log truck, because your cell phone won’t have enough signal to be tracked by the government, let alone make a call.  But I can say that about most of Coosa County.  It is a good place for a person to simply disappear.  Many have.

I have stood on this spot before.  A narrow strip of Bermuda that is outrageously out of place, a little patch of grass that mimics a manicured subdivision lawn.  It is at the river’s edge.  A cabin is perched on the hillside up-slope.  The riverbank on this side of the Coosa is steep but gradual, and a few other cabins squat along the bank back toward the highway.  The one behind me was once a mobile home, but a skillful carpenter framed it in so that it looks like a cabin.  I know this because I tried to sell it for a man once, long ago.  An over-priced cabin with a secret.

The other side of the river is wild and beautiful.  A shear bluff 500 feet down to the waterline.  Limestone outcrops punctuate gnarled and stunted oaks and hickories, their branches heavy with Spanish moss that seems oddly out of place this far from the coast.

The current is swift here. Deceptively so.  The surface is gunmetal gray, but the roiling murky brown water hidden underneath swirls to the surface and then submerges again.

I watch this silently.  Try to read the river like an old manuscript.  In my mind’s eye I can see the Coosa when it ran wild before the dam.  Back when hundred-year floods sent sharecropper’s houses, barns, and livestock rolling past this spot toward the Gulf.

There are fish in this river.  Big fish.  Old men who sit out front of Kelly’s Crossroads store talk about catfish as big as Buicks below the dam, hovering silently in the murky depths.  Big blind yellow-cats that patrol the bottom at depths where no sunlight has ever penetrated.  Some will swear on a stack of Bibles that Alabama Power can’t hire divers to inspect the dam below the surface, because they know what’s down there.  They have heard the old stories of men who went down and never came back up.  About the one who made it back to the surface but spent the rest of his years wide-eyed and silent in a padded room up at the nervous hospital in Tuscaloosa. 

I suddenly realize that I am not alone.  I am standing next to a stranger.  He is casting into the depths with heavy tackle, long stout rod and spinning reel with 100-pound test line, the kind of rig you would see on a charter boat in the Gulf, or fishing for marlin in the Keys.

I watch him silently.  He casts upstream and lets the line run by with the current.  He doesn’t look at me.

“They’re running” he says.

I don’t recognize his accent, but it’s not one from around here.  His weathered face is partially hidden under a faded black Harley Davidson baseball cap.  A skull patch with “Live to Ride – Ride to Live” on the front.  Shirt sleeves rolled up above the elbows exposing tattoos of dark angels in hellish landscapes. 

“You ride?” I ask.  I’m looking for common ground.  “Maybe we can hook-up and ride to…”

He waves me off mid-sentence.

“Today we fish” he says.

In an instant I see something roll up through the surface.  Something big.  Great White shark big.  Flash of white belly in the twilight, the size and color of a beech log.  It is gone in the blink of an eye, slipping back silently below the current.

I wonder if he too saw, but he has turned away from me.  “Pick up that rig and cast upstream.  Let it float with the current.  Let her take it and run, then snatch that pole back with both hands to set the hook.  You best be ready when she hits it.”

I do as he says.  I see the bait plop through the surface and disappear.  I watch the line as it moves with the current and passes where I stand on the bank.  His line is still in the water, but he’s no longer watching it.  His is gaze has turned to me.

I feel the line tug.  Watch all the slack vanish and see the rod tip snap downward.

“Steady… steady… now. Snatch it!”

I feel every muscle in my body tense as I jerk the rod backwards with both hands.  The pull on the line is immovable.  I have hooked something so big that it is pulling me toward the murky water as it moves downstream.  In a millisecond I realize that I am the one who is hooked.  I am the one who is being played.  I am caught.  My mind screams “let go, let go,” but I cannot.

I turn to the man for help, but he is gone.  His voice is a whisper in my ear.  “You want to ride, son?  Let’s ride.  Now taste and see that the Lord is good.”

I begin to scream.

And then I wake up.

Once Upon a Time

Once Upon a Time

I find Twitter to be a waste of consciousness, but the Redhead still frequents it.  She does it with certain Sicilian tendencies: “keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

Occasionally she will read aloud a post that I find interesting.

Last night she asked me “What was the first book you read that changed your life?  The Bible excluded.”

I thought some about that.  Looked at the ceiling.  Stared into space.  A couple of minutes went by.

“I didn’t mean it to be that serious of a question.”

But it was a very serious question, at least to me.  I have read a lot of good books.  But the first that changed my life?  I struggled to recall them all, working backward to childhood.

My first impulse was The Catcher in the Rye.  I read that one in twelfth grade at the urging of my rather eccentric English teacher Mrs. Hammonds.  It is a book that was (and still is) banned in many public schools.  It was on the RESTRICTED list in my school library, which meant it was behind the counter and my momma had to sign a permission slip for me to read it.

Thank God I have a good momma. 

And thank God she never read The Catcher in the Rye.

I can’t say that book changed my life, but it certainly changed my outlook on life.  I knew a lot of characters in that story, especially the narrator.

But I digress.  Read it yourself — but only if your momma allows it.

I knew there had to be a book before that one.  It took another ten minutes or so and I had my answer.

A Separate Peace by John Knowles.

“What?  I have never even heard of it.  Why?”

I had to admit that I did not recall much about the story, so many years later.  I do remember that it was about a young man who went to a war and came out a very different person.  He had to declare a “separate peace” – a peace with himself.

But that’s not how it changed my life.  It wasn’t the story per se, it was the type – the first “adult” book I remember reading.

If you were properly educated in the English language, you know that all the best childhood stories begin and end with two simple phrases:

“Once upon a time…”

and

“They lived happily ever after.”

There is beauty in that by design.  It is comforting when momma is about to put out the light and you are pretty sure there is a monster under your bed. 

But we soon come to realize that those stories aren’t representative of life in mortal flesh.  At least not the “happily ever after part.”

I had not forgotten how I came to read A Separate Peace.  Miss Klinner, my seventh-grade English teacher, gave our class the book as an assignment.  As incentive, she offered to give a copy to the first student who read it.  I got to keep mine two days later.  It is still in my personal library.  I can put my hands on it right now, with or without the mysterious electrical construct that is “The Cloud.”

Perhaps it was not the book that changed my life so much as it was the teacher.  She taught me the nuts and bolts of a complicated language through diagrammed sentences and conjugated verbs, but she also showed me how to love and appreciate the never-ending pleasure of reading good books.

I have always loved her for that, as I continue to love the written word that imitates life.

And that may be about as close to as “happily ever after” as a man can get.


 [BC1]