Barber

Not long ago, I read the blog post of my mentor who had to say goodbye to his barber. I found a great example of loyal customer who visited the same barber for over thirty years. Then came the moment for me to have haircut for my Jasmine. This turned out to be a haphazard zigzag style.

Which brings me to the memory of my barber.

The experience of being a child to visit the barber for the first time has a common affliction with visiting the dentist: fear of the knife and the chair. Both are frightening. Dentist and barber are alike when it's the first time you visit them. I started seeing the difference between a dentist and barber after the second visit, of course. My barber's razor never hurts, his smile always shines.

The place was essentially a tenement building where I climbed the terrazzo staircase to find my barber, who was much older than the decrepit building. And it was the comic magazine I liked most about visiting that barber. To me, those magazines were dog-eared but amiable. And by the time my mother allowed me to visit the barber on my own, I had finished all his comic magazines. At the age of 10, I'd still looked forward to visiting my barber. Next I heard about my barber's plan to retire. After that he welcomed me to visit him for haircut for another one year or two – before he really retired.

Sayonara to the barber is hard to say, and it is.