WHAT YOU CAN LEARN FROM A BARBER CHAIR

Reading your daily newspaper is not much fun anymore. The news is relentlessly bad, and the stories unbearably familiar. However, reading your daily newspaper in the local barbershop can be very different. Eloquently so...!

Here I refer to the little drama that was playing out during my last visit. Dickie -- I think that was his name -- 3-year-old Dickie was getting his first "grown-up" haircut. Now before we rush past this observation, lets consider for a precious moment just what a celebratory event this is.

There, cloaked and perched atop the barber-chair's kiddie platform, is the little boy about to experience his initiation into little manhood. There will of course be others. The newest teen-look...the swaggering stud-look ....the prom-night-look....eventually, at my age, the save-whatever-hair-you-can-look.

But on this particular Thursday afternoon, proud hovering mama was giving the barber her last teary-eyed instructions. She wanted Dickie to look like a big-boy, and yet not so much that he would lose the little-boy look she has so cherished for so long. Ron -- the patient master with the shears -- listened attentively. Then tried to accomplish the mission even while mama kept circling the chair. And Dickie kept fidgeting with uncertainty.

What makes the scene so indispensable is its existential implications.

Here is a study in parental love...professional patience...youth on the verge....and a shop full of adults whose lives may in some way be shaped by emerging Dickie and all the other Dickies in the land. A kind of torch-passing as one generation offers up its best gift to a waiting world. Some day soon, Dickie might just be the quarterback we cheer, the candidate we elect, the neighbor who moves next door, and yes the future we count on.

Mama surely understands all this, as she carefully scoops up some of Dickie's locks for her very own....