Thursday, September 26, 2019

As he cuts my hair, the barber sings along to a trip-hop remix of "Helplessly Hoping." The shop is quiet now, though it will be mobbed in the afternoon. He shuttles back and forth between another customer and me. He is coloring her hair, applying a butterscotch-beige paste with a broad paintbrush, then working it in with the pointy end of a comb and a cotton swab. Passing by his shop this morning on my way from Hebrew class to work, I had stopped in. Since only the coloring session was scheduled for now, and that involved a lot of waiting, he offered to handle us both at once. The other customer was late, so he called her. She was circling, looking for a parking spot. One had just opened up outside the shop, so he picked up a wicker chair, ran down to the street, and put the chair down in the spot to reserve it. The customer carried the chair back in when she arrived. Now, as he guides a razor down the path of my sideburns, I tell him that I hadn't planned to drop in but did so spontaneously. "You're becoming a local," he says. "You see that when going from there to there you can also go here and here, and you do it. For two years, you've been like an airplane, circling the city. Now, you know how things fit together, and you're coming in to land."