By Joe Samuelson III

He can't smile without his teeth showing. He's happy to see me even though he doesn't know who I am. His touch is reassuring because each time his fingers pinch together, he is one snip closer to changing my life.

Above the mirror that details my transformation, a wood sign rests on a shelf with the name Jim and two pictures of deer heads on each side. Jim, for these few minutes, is my friend, my counselor, and my storyteller. He controls me. He is my barber.And he works at of the last true barbershops, the kind with a real red, white, and blue striped barberpole by the entrance: the Plaza Barbershop of Plattsburgh, New York.

When I first sit in Jim's personal design throne, he says one thing to me: "Regular?"

"Yep," I reply.

"Round or square?" is his second question.

To those who've never stepped inside a barbershop, this question might seem odd and meaningless. But to those who've donated their head to the barber every two or three weeks, it's a simple question of how they want the little hairs at the nape of the neck to look.

"Round," I requested.

With that, he's off. First step is to get the clippers out.

"Tilt this way… don't move…turn that way," he commands.

I do as I'm told. I don't want to think about the repercussions of not following such simple orders, even though Jim has never severed an ear in his life.

The sleigh bells on the door start jingling as an old man makes his way in. "Hey Jim," the old man says as he hangs his bomber jacket on a hanger by the entrance.

"Hey Bob," Jim replies, with a smile on his face. "How's Rita?"

"She's good, she's good," Bob answers. He picks the Sporting News from the stack of readables lying on the chair across from me and starts to finger through the outdated pages. He looks back at Jim.

"Where's Wayne today?"

A sign with Wayne looms over an empty barber's chair. The mirrors are clean, and it looks as if nothing has been touched in several days.

"Wayne's gone south," JoAnne, another barber, butts in to explain. "He's gone to Florida to see if there's anything for him down there."

"Is that so?" Bob asked.

"Ya, he said he wanted to drive down but he changed his mind," JoAnne answered without once looking up from the half sleeping old man whose hair she was perfecting.

"He went by air," Jim added.

"Oh," said Bob, "what about Lee?"

"He's in the back eating lunch," JoAnne answered.

Their talk continues on about the big game in Syracuse last night, but I can only hear bits and pieces of the conversation while the clippers buzz back and forth around my ear, rejecting all the unwanted growth.

He bends my ear and twists my head to find the perfect angle for his next chop. My head is no longer mine; it's Jim's. To him it's a ball of clay with which he can sculpt any number of the designs he has mastered throughout his time with the scissors.

"You look at the head first," he tells me. "Then you sort of determine how much shorter you want."

The buzzing begins as talk of Syracuse fills the tiny shop. Like Siddhartha's 'Om,' the hum of the electric clippers brings to me a sense of peace. I know that the sound is just a small part of the whole process. In its own way, it belongs.

When the sides are clean and two inches shorter, a comb comes from the jar of blue juice sitting on the counter. With each stroke of the comb, the jungle of disorganization on my head starts to cool down and find order. It's a sensation that starts at the tip of each brown hair and moves down through my body until each toe is calm.

The scissors make their first appearance when my dome is ready for the final stages of transformation. I'm sitting with my back to a man waving razor-sharp scissors no more than an inch from my head, and I'm the most relaxed I've been since just before I fell asleep last night.
As the snipping commences, the sleigh bells are activated again. A stout, dark-haired man with a mustache makes his way in.

"Hey Phil," says Jim, keeping his focus on the mess of hair I have left him with.

"Hey Jim," says Phil. Phil's round face compliments his stomach and the black scraggly unkempt beard, which sags below his second chin, is in desperate need of the hot-lather machine and Jim's pearl-handled straight razor. Phil squeezes between the wooden armrests of one of the black vinyl seats and picks up the Sports section of the local paper, the Press Republican.

For a moment, what would be a shop filled with silence is littered with the snapping sounds of three separate pairs of scissors all slicing a new image of some lucky man waiting for the reconstruction to be finished.

"So you go to school at Plattsburgh?" asks Jim.

"Yep," I say.

"What do you study?"

"Journalism."

"So you're a writer?" His assumption is fair, but not completely accurate.

"I don't know about that. Maybe someday I can say that, but right now I'm practicing. I've still got a lot to learn."

"We all do." In the mirror I see a quaint smile emerge from the previously concentrated straight face he had been wearing.

We all do. These are words of wisdom. From the old to the young. Passed down to the generation after. We all have a lot to learn. Jim does too. But here and now I have learned something as well.

Jim has been in the barbering business for over forty years. He must have seen thousands of faces and heard hundreds of stories. The people he's met and the places he's been through tales alone probably extend to the far reaches of the earth. He's seen generations move on, leaving their legacy to their children, who, as either a sign of good faith or a matter of convenience remain dedicated to his little shop in the far corner of the plaza. He knows people. He's enjoys them. "If I didn't enjoy people, I wouldn't really like this business." And yet with decades of heads having been manicured, each one with a different tale, a different memory, a different life, Jim knows that he doesn't know it all.

For forty-one years he's heard these tales, and he still shows up the next day.

"I've never gotten tired of it. You meet a lot of people and you learn a lot if you listen. You become a listener. But you learn quick not to believe everything you hear and half of what you see." He recites the old proverb like it's a part of his repertoire and has said it a hundred times before. I glance at him with a brief smile acknowledging the reference but here it sticks with me more than it has before. Both Jim and I have said, "don't believe everything you hear and only half of what you see" before but it means a little more now that Jim has said it to me. He has had contact with far more people in his fifty-nine years than I can ever expect too and the old saying is still with him. A look into his soft blue eyes tells a story of the past. He has heard many a tall tale, and seen too many life stories played out to think any other way. From here it's a saying that I can no longer take for granted.

Jim isn't a magician. He would blend into any crowd of people and be lost among the faces. In fact there isn't much of a difference between Jim, Lee, Wayne or any one of the men that barber around the world. Aside from his profession nothing sets him apart. But when tarnished and gray people walk through the door, read a little about sports or fishing and sit waiting for their time; Jim is there. He takes care of their feelings, their confidence, and their style. Then he watches those same people leave, sculpted, sometimes shining, and as they exit he takes pride in the fact that he is responsible for their heads being held a little higher as they walk out with just a little more confidence in each step.

I can feel that my session is almost over now. My head is lighter and Jim is in the final stages. The tiny hairs on my neck are gone. The straight blade took care of that. A dust of powder engulfs my head as Jim pats down my neck and wipes the stray hairs away with his towel.

Three chairs down JoAnne has finished with her sleeping old man who has a proper looking bald head, nicely trimmed on the sides. He pays his eight dollars and slowly makes his way towards the door. Before he can cause the bells to door's sleigh bells to ring, Phil is already sitting in JoAnne's chair. They go on with what seems like the usual 'how ya doin? Where ya been? What have you been up to?' It's obvious Phil's a regular and JoAnne knows just where to start. He mentions briefly that he's got a big job interview in a couple hours so he figured he'd stop in. With out any more words JoAnne knows that her fingers could control the fate of Phil's interview.

"Done," Jim says.

He holds up a mirror behind me so I can see how he did on the back. It's perfectly rounded, just how I like it. The frontal cape that has kept my cloths from being infested with my waste-hair comes off, and when I stand I am new again. My back is straighter, my shoulders a little wider, and my strides are longer. I give Jim a ten and tell him to keep the change.

As I walk out the door, he returns to his chair. The last thing I hear is one simple word: "next."