Americana

This morning I got to go to Miller's barber shop with one of the participants so they could get a haircut. What a treat to see an old fashioned barbershop. The barber is a woman who has had her shop in this same location for many years. From the looks of her picture on her license it looks like she has been a beautician for many, many years. The shop is small...seven mismatched chairs line the outside wall directly across from the six mounted deer horns on the opposite wall (always a reminder we're in deer country). Over the course of seeing four people get their haircut, she never once swept the hair up off the floor. She beat the chair with her towel before the next person sat down and she was ready to start the next customer.
These are the places where Hillary, Mitt, Obama and Fred need to hang out to get a sense of what the concerns are in our country. In the course of just a few customers, you will hear all sorts of topics from immigration (illegal and otherwise), county, state and federal politics, the goings on in the local school districts and what your neighbors are up to. This is the lifeblood of every small town in America....the places where births and deaths are shared.
Haircuts are $5 unless you want a flat-top and then they're $6. Locals gather to have Ms. Miller cut, trim,talk and more importantly listen to whatever topic the customer wants to discuss. While her scissors snip and her clippers buzz away the hair of her customers, she is nodding and listening intently. I'm sure to many of these men it is a delight to have her listening and hanging onto their every word, that to them, the $5 is a bargain...
One of the topics I heard discussed was the student population at one of the area schools...Big Sandy. Yes, that's the name of the school...not the name of Bubba's girlfriend. This year's graduating class is expected to be 30 students...I heard that a local school, just up the road from the Care Center, which has grades K - 12 has an entire school population of 124 students. Wow...Can you imagine the close knit bond that those students must share, with their classmates, by the time they graduate ? You've cultivated a lifelong friendship in the span of your school days. That is if you graduate from school and don't drop out....(there seemed to be a joke at the barbershop that Ms.Miller HAD graduated from the third grade so perhaps staying in school is a problem in these parts. One of the participants told me once that Texans fall into one of three categories....1/3 drive pick-up trucks, 1/3 don't have all their teeth and 1/3 live in shacks for houses. I'm not sure what it means if you hit all three categories...
So this morning was like a trip back in time....where the men gather at the local barber shop to talk politics and solve the world's problems and the women listen, nod and trim the hair out of their ears.