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Published: November 16th 2010
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In the summer of 1971, I packed up a pair of bellbottom jeans, a necklace of those ubiquitous love beads, a couple of peasant blouses that were less substantial than kleenex that had been through the wash cycle, and left home for the first and last time. I had rented a small studio apartment for seventy-five dollars a month, which seemed like a grown-up sum of money. My dad offered to drive me over and, as we pulled up in front of my new place, he looked troubled. Perhaps he was wondering how a man who waltzed his daughters around the kitchen after dinner could have turned so hopelessly bourgeois overnight. Or perhaps he was sensing, quite rightly, that I was about to turn his family home into my personal laundromat. ¨Ah well,¨ he said, sighing heavily. ¨Let’s just call it a bedroom on the other side of town.¨ It was a sentimental side of him, not often shown.
The discovery of this place was a real event for me, and I loved my little apartment with the intensity of a child making a fort out of couch cushions and a blanket. The main room was no bigger than a
walk-in closet and the kitchen was formerly a back landing. I shared a bathroom with two home economics students, both named Judy, who helped stock my cupboards with small boxes of raisins and packets of soy sauce from Chinese take-away. On the third floor lived a girl whose cousin, Margaret, was engaged to be married to Pierre Trudeau. He told this girl that she had a beautiful smile, so we all practiced smiling like the cousin of Margaret Trudeau. It was a summer of love beads and laughter, with lots of teeth showing.
Even though I intended to begin my life over from this point, anyone could see that I made a terrible hippie. Somehow, I just couldn't get the hang of complaining about the system by day then sleeping in oversized rollers by night. To sum up: it might have been fun but I just couldn’t run with it. Yet, to this day, this has never stopped me from indulging myself in harmless reinvention. Presently, I am fallen Spanish nobility, passing through a cigar-coloured living room. Amber light gushes in through a half-shuttered window from a backyard garden of pomegranate, quince and orange trees. Ripe fruit sags from
the branches. A couple of sinewy cats weave figure-eights around my ankles. The lagoon at our doorstep is as blue and tranquil as a painted plate and I picture myself living forever in this stately country home, serviced by maids and coachmen. In the distance, the sueded hills...
Well, you get the picture. In real life, the chimney smokes, the pillows are astonishingly lumpy, and I’ve taken to walking around in a sack-like burnoose (and if that’s not a look, I don’t know what is). Ron, for his part, wears blue suspenders and a red ball cap, and refuses to get a haircut. Tufts of hair poke out at wild angles from underneath his hat band and the rest, the fuzz, travels down the back of his neck. He’s holding out for a barber in Seville and, somewhere in the middle of my aggravation, I can’t help thinking how much my dad would have appreciated that. Really, he would have laughed out loud. For in my collection of quintessential Sid-isms, there are a few stand-out favourites. To give you an example, after the evening meal and before the waltzing, he would always push away from the table and say,
“So, what’s for dinner?” Or, while waiting at a stoplight with my mother at the wheel, he’d always say, “Marcie, it’s green. And it’s not getting greener.” But the most applicable one in the present situation applies to haircuts. “Five bucks to cut it. Five bucks to find it.” It was his standard line.
So, when Ron gets his ten euro haircut in Seville, I will be thinking of Dad. They share the same hairline, the same sense of humour. And when later, in the plaza, we come across a couple in dreadlocks and ventilated blue jeans, making a living out of a flamenco guitar and a set of tambourines, I’ll smile, not sadly, but with a whole lot of fondness. And I’ll toss a little money in their opened guitar case, in homage to our former selves, now two weary travellers, with a full sack of laundry, heading home.
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Ron
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I Can Get Some Respect...from a European Barber
Yes, I was pretty scruffy from the outset. A few weeks before our departure, I stopped by Johnny's in Keremeos for my usual $10 cut. The nice thing about Johnny's is that it is like stepping into Floyd's Barber Shop in Mayberry (minus Sheriff Andy Taylor). While the unruly hair gets machine shaved much like the standard treatment from the Vietnamese ladies in Vancouver (at twice the cost), I get to sit and wait my turn while Johnny moderates among the inebriated first nations cowboy, the Indo-Canadian farmer hoping for more heat for his peach trees and the Italian immigrant putting forth his two cents on how the weather is treating his grapevines. Politics, women, hockey, property values......I get the whole rundown in my half-hour in the shop. But nothing compares with the respect and care a senior hair-deprived gentleman like myself receives in Europe. I recall my first trip to Israel (not Europe but close) where the barbers understood Jewish hair. That was okay. But still it was just the setup for my spunatina (trim) in Rome. Just beneath our quarters in the Jewish section of Rome was my servant in waiting. An old European shop with coloured bottles of lotions, salves, skin bracers and mysterious potions lined the counter beneath the mirror. First came the scissors. Then came the strop sharpened razor. Along came the old world version of the machine clippers operated the old=fashioned way......squeezing the handles to pinch the blades together. Next the scalp massage with fingers followed by the neck massage with a machine which fit into the palm of the maestro's hand. Finally, the dust-up. I left in a cloud of manly scented powder. I recently had a nice cut and shave in Luarca, Spain but was disappointed when the shave section was performed using a Gillette Turbo razor. Mind you, the Spanish chica who attentively removed every stray hair while delighting me with wafts of her come-hither perfume wasn't bad. But give me an old man for this task any time. He's seen hair. He knows hair. So how delighted I was to have spied The Barber of Seville just across the street on our first day in said city while munching on a 1/4 kilo of Calemares from the freitura accompanied by a Cruzcampo cervezita. He was hanging out the door looking for a customer but I had to finish the business at hand. It was only minutes before I bounded across the road only to find The Barber's wife dragging him out of the shop (1:30 pm) for siesta. Told that the shop would reopen at 4:30, we whiled away the afternoon in The Alcazar in the most pleasant way. Standing before the Mary where Columbus prayed for safe travels for his journeys to the new world. Getting lost in the warren of rooms all decorated by the finest Moorish artists doing as King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella bid (when she was not busy ordering the racial and religious cleansing of the recently unified Spain). Wandering the gardens and looking over the shoulders of the myriad of artists picking their corner of the garden to interpret on their canvas. Finally, 4:30 arrived. I was a little late so I had to wait for the gentleman already in the chair and the priest who would precede me. The Barber had a great selection of current magazines, but I was a bit self-conscious paging through ordinary magazines only to find, time after time, a spread of lovely Spanish girls unadulterated by clothing, tattoos or unnatural embelishments. Very careful to keep the open pages out of sight from Father Pedro. I was sorry for the Barber. He was having such a good time chatting with each customer as they mounted his chair and together they would laugh at the commentary coming from the blaring radio. But, with great courtesy, I was invited to mount up, caballero that I am. A few brief words passed between us which caused a flashback to the time that, when I was 7 years old and sent off to the barber by myself, I agreed to a "butch". Horrified with the result that time (this was the days of Brylcreem and all the shaping which it inspired), I wore a hat for two weeks. This time was different. We started with shearing my head like a sheep. What would be left, I wondered. Not much. But then the loving scissorwork began. And like Tim Burton's Edward, The Barber circled around me at the most intimate closeness so that he could perfectly shape the little that remained. All the while, his heavy open mouthed breathing tinged by his recent cigarette reminded me of the huffing of Spartan, my horse in Granada, as Spartan stuggled to carry his heavy burden uphill. Then the razor work. My mind blotted out the thought of AIDS as there was no sign that this sharp-edged sword had received any special treatment since its use on the many preceding customers. Like Columbus before Mary, I put faith in the inordinate skill of The Barber who had been plying his trade for 50 years. Unharmed, we moved on to the the stroking of my head with the finest brushes to remove any lingering cut hair from from my delicate scalp and forehead. Finally, as is the custom, the cloud of powder and one happy hombre dismounted and stepped happily into the warm streets of Seville. The best and most memorable haircut of my life.