Playing Hookey

I am so happy (cough cough) that I decided not to go to work tomorrow. Actually I do have a cold (serious tone) and it has given me the excuse to rest. Puritan work ethic be damned.

My father, who was a barber, never missed a day of work in his life. He opened his shop at 6am and on weekends he put out the "closed" sign at 8pm. In the early morning there would be impatient men sitting in their cars in the parking lot. Sometimes they would wait in the dark an hour or more for my father to appear. They would half-tease him, saying "If you don't need the money, I guess I'll go someplace else."

On Saturday, the busy day, the row of chairs by the wall was full of customers and I was expected to sweep the barbershop floor. My father would step aside as I plowed great prickly heaps of hair around his old barber chair to a small trap door in the floor. I would then ease the pile over the edge where I would watch it slide like a great dark avalanche into the depths of the musty basement.

The men in the shop would kid me, ask if I liked my job and how much did my dad pay me. For the customers' entertainment my dad would flip a dime onto the floor and Alex, his German Shorthair Pointer, would fetch it, picking it up with his teeth and dropping it into my dad's outstretched palm. He would hand me a few pennies and I would fly out the door with my gumballs as the TV blared, the men laughed and the smells of talc and pomade and human hair were, without my knowledge or consent, forever embedded in my memory.

I never miss a good opportunity to play hookie.