Don Pesci: Abby's Barbershop: A Parable
VERNON, Conn.
G.K. Chesterton somewhere writes that all barbers are would-be philosophers under the skin. The trade has changed over the years. Barbers used to be surgeons at a time before pharmacology and modern medicine branched off and began to produce physicians who knew a little more about human healing than the barbarous barbers who painted their poles red and white. In medieval Europe, barbers, not doctors, performed surgery, and the pole was a sign that indicated the blood and napkins used in their business, the barber’s most frequent customers being soldiers whose bodies had been shattered on the field of battle.
Barbers left off surgery, but not philosophizing.
The philosophizing is a result of customer immobility and peculiar circumstances familiar to every barber and dentist. If you have gone into a barber shop for a haircut and shave, you will understand how much like a confessional or a psychologist’s couch the barber chair is. And the best barbers tend to be on the loquacious side because they wish to keep their customers coming back. Experiencing a haircut and a shave without chatter is too much like waiting for the guillotine to drop. People who are immobilized with foam on their faces and a straight-edge razor glinting above them generally will be in the mood for calming small talk. The best philosophy is small talk writ large, and the good barber, like Socrates, will have had a good deal of experience in chatting up his customers.
So it is at Abby’s Barber Shop. The proprietor, Abby, is gentle, chatty on subjects that do not wound her clients and, above all, agreeable. It is chancy disputing on difficult subjects with someone wielding a scissors and a razor. The secret to success in barberology is to put all disputants at ease, disarming them and so leaving them helpless in the face of the barber’s superior weaponry. Accomplished barbers are practiced in the fine art of agreeing to disagree on disagreeable propositions. It also helps a good deal when the customer is satisfied with the barber’s work, and customer satisfaction generally involves, during the first few visits at least, a good deal of inquiry and negotiation.
Some of Abby’s older customers are abrupt and set in their ways. “What should I do if a customer is rude?” her assistant asked her.
“Put on your most agreeable tone and ask him to move his chin a little to the left. It will not hurt if he glimpses the razor or the scissors.”
After her father died, Abby inherited the barbershop from her brother, 20 years her senior, who had retired early and moved to Tennessee.
Other barbers, and I suppose dentists, sometimes take advantage of their victims' incapacitation.
John the Barber: You’re married right?
Victim: (A hot towel across his face in preparation for a straight-razor shave) Mufftt..
John: Thought so. You probably have children. I’d rather have warts myself. Kids are always a problem, right?
Victim: Mufftalm.
John: Ah, three! Triple trouble. Girls are better than boys, though they are expensive propositions when given away in marriage to loathsome sons-in-law. No decent father wants to give his girl up to such beasts.
This kind of friendly-hostile badinage would never have occurred in Abby's shop, which -- I say it to shame shameless politicians – will be closing before Connecticut’s politicians decide that the 75-year-old barbershop is a necessary pleasantry, even though barbers no longer perform surgery. For that matter, surgeons in Connecticut no longer may perform elective operations in the shutdown-state, because room must be made in hospitals to accommodate empty beds.
Customer: So, you’re closing shop. What a shame.
Abby: Yes, and moving too. But this is not a decision of ours. We have been forced to it by politicians who have never seen the inside of this shop. But that is the nature of politics in the state. When you grow old, the good book tells us, someone will tie a rope around your waist and take you where you do not wish to go.
Customer: That shouldn’t happen.
Abby: No. Some of my customers, the older ones, believe that winter should not happen. But here we are, and the snow is falling outside.
Customer: Some of these people who make laws ….
Abby: We live in a state in which both political parties are divided by a common purpose: how to provide for the common good, and none of them understand that the common good is best served when they are no longer in command. But all that has come to a stop. The legislature, fearing the plague, has put itself into suspended animation, and now all the important decisions are being made behind closed doors by the governor.
Customer: A good man. All this mess was thrown into his lap….
Abby: Well, I certainly will miss our little chats (brandishing her razor). Could you turn your head a bit to the left please? I want to get at your neck.
A subtle barber was Abby. She now has moved to Tennessee, where her brother has opened a barbershop, for the business of scraping necks with straight razors is a lifetime pursuit, full of secret pleasures.
Don Pesci (donpesci@att.net) is a Vernon-based columnist
The War Memorial Tower in Vernon