I can count on my barber’s door always being open. If only because it doesn’t close properly.
In summer, my barber’s front door is open from morning through closing time. As is the back door. The draft inside his shop is legendary, vectors of air furiously flowing in all directions between the bustling street front and the idyllic tomato-garden-bordered back lane.
Come fall, however, the front door refuses to go gently into the jamb. My barber keeps having to leave his chair to swing it shut each time a new patron walks in. He does this like it’s the most natural thing, unquestioningly, as if this is how this door is meant to close. My barber knows the world. Sometimes I think he’s been cutting hair since before doors were even invented.
There was a time when in addition to giving haircuts and shaves, barbers also performed surgeries, extracted teeth, and administered enemas. The white and red stripes on barber poles? Bandages and blood.
Today, the barber pole continues to be a beacon for the curative powers of the barbershop, but differently. More like medicine for the soul, spinning histories redolent of fathers and grandfathers gathered to debate politics, sports, the weather, and more politics, while sons and grandsons surreptitiously leaf through outdated issues of porn magazines tucked under the pile of tabloids and gossip rags.
The old mechanical cash register, so analog. The sound of the blade coming alive against the leather of the razor strop. The row of mirrors lining the walls so you could argue with a patron three chairs down and still look him in the eye. And of course, the hand-held mirror signalling you’ve reached the end of the grooming line. A subtle nod of approval, a humble acknowledgement — a more understated act of gentlemanly reciprocity you will never find.
My barber’s shop reminds us there was a time when a fresh haircut was akin to giving aspirations a clean start, with bangs parted away from your field of vision to see possibility where evidence would suggest otherwise. A hopeful illusion, like the wise old barber pole itself.
The barber pole is a heartening optical paradox of what we perceive and what we know to be true existing side by side, and therein lies its most enduring restorative significance. If the human brain, in the face of incongruous visual input, can accept the appearance of the diagonal stripes moving vertically up the pole despite evidence the pole actually rotates horizontally, how’s that for opening the door wide open to seeing possibility?