Barbara J. Hamby

Just Another Haircut

I plop myself down in the barber chair I’ve occupied about once a month for the last four years. My lady barber is obviously not herself. I discerned that while I was waiting to get in the chair. She was finishing a haircut when I came in. So I sat and waited. While I was waiting, another of her customers came in and she told him, “It will be just a few minutes.” When she was done with the cut she was working on, she went to the back room for a broom and swept up all the hair. Then she disappeared into the back room for about five or ten minutes. She came back out and called me to the chair.

The man waiting obviously had not understood that I was waiting for her and was ahead of him, so he asked her, in a sarcastic tone,  how long she would be. She told him about ten minutes.

While she’s cutting my hair, I ask her how she is. She says, “Fine, I’m fine.” She goes on to complain about eyes gummed shut in the morning and a runny nose. All of this is in her broken English. She is Italian and does great haircuts when she’s at her best. Today, she is not.

I wonder if I should ask her what’s bothering her. I decide it’s none of my business and she probably won’t tell me anyway. In the middle of the haircut, she says she’ll be right back and disappears into the back room again for a couple of minutes. I decide I may have an odd-looking head for the next month since I can’t very well leave now in the middle of the job. When she finishes, I look around for the man who was waiting. I don’t see him. He apparently gave up and had someone else do his cut or walked out.

Today, after three days of combings, my hair isn’t too bad