MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Another place you used to hear politics discussed was the local barbershop. The barbershop was once a slice of life so quintessentially American, it was immortalized by artist Norman Rockwell. And as Scott Woods tells it in his poem "Black Country Club," the barbershop exists now mainly in memory.
SCOTT WOODS:
Everything in Boyd's Barber Shop is a curio cabinet: the shoeshine booth of cleaning supplies, the middle chair that no one has ever sat in and no barber has ever stood behind, the wall mirror crowned with radios older than music itself, the cash register tacked with IOUs that the barbers happily never fill, the newsstand shaped curiously like a picnic table. The more things change, the more they don't: a two-man lumber saw with worn handles over a dull frosty root beer clock that still keeps perfect time; a string of plants that have only ever seen a sun that rises and sets at the flick of a switch but grow anyway.
My mother enrolled me in this country club when I was a child when she was done mangling my hair in a kitchen chair on her own. The shop was non-smoking years before it was fashion or law, but he has to buzz you in now because crime is always in fashion, follows no laws and hustlers of cheap clothing and incense are thieves of your time and patience. And all of the grown folks conversations sound so different now. I must have secretly passed the initiation in another barber's chair. I know mortgage and his cousin, taxes, who died and when. How about these elections? Who's the pastor of that church now? I get to have grown folks conversation, but I know where to draw the line.
No matter how old you get, you're always as young as you ever were to your barber. He has been looking at the top of your head through all of your social plights and prom emergencies. You will tell him nothing about yourself he didn't see coming in the grain of your naps. Every head is a dented and poured crystal ball to him.
Before I leave, he talks about selling the shop and going west while he can still drive. But who would buy such a thing? No so-called barber of this day could keep up with the character. Today, they collect barber licenses like trading cards. And somebody has to make sure the tanned and weary frosty root beer clock is sprung forward every year. No barber with a beeper and an appointment book is going to think to do that. But 40 years is a long time behind the same chair, and I'm still too young and don't get my hair cut enough to have that conversation.
BRAND: Scott Woods is a poet living in Columbus, Ohio.
NPR's DAY TO DAY continues. I'm Madeleine Brand.
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