the old barber and "skip"

of all the things that i've lost in my life, and i lose things all the time, there is something that i lost recently that has bothered me more than anything i can remember losing has bothered me in a long time, if ever.

it was a small cutout from a newspaper, an obituary notice, printed in 1990. it couldn't have been more than a couple of inches long and maybe an inch wide. i kept it folded in my wallet and every now and again i would pull it out, discolored and tattered though it was after taking residency in my wallet for 17 some odd years, and read it. i would read it and i would remember the person immortalized within, for he was someone that had touched my life. profoundly.

this little piece of newsprint was valuable to me, so valuable that upon being held up by a couple of armed goons on bienville street in new orleans in 2002, i requested that i be able to remove the clip from my wallet before i handed it over to them for their taking. they could keep the cash and my drivers license and my social security card and whatever else was contained within, but i refused to allow them to take this little slip of paper with them. i was hopelessly and irrationally attached to it.

i lost the obit cutout recently when i lost a wallet, a wallet that i left on the counter at a starbucks as i was paying for my coffee. the irony of the fact that i lost something that i valued so greatly in the course of acquiring another thing that i value greatly(caffeinated goodness) has not been lost on me.

the person whose obituary that i valued so much was an old man as i was a young boy, an old man who was arguably the closest friend that i had for a substantial period of my childhood. his name was, as i called him then and still refer to him now, mr. fanguy (pronounced "fun-ge").

mr. fanguy and i met at around the time that i was 7 or 8 years old. my mom and dad, both just out of college, had started a business together and rented an office space in houma, the closest thing there was to a "city" near the small, backwater louisiana town that i grew up in. next door to mom and dad's business was a barber shop, an old timey one, complete with the twirling candy cane thingie on the wall outside of it's door. the sign on the wall of the building read, "fanguy's barbershop."

i can't remember the first time that i met mr. fanguy, who must have been in his late 70s or early 80s at the time, but i suspect that it was in the course of cajoling my mom to bring me into his place for a haircut. you see, we were kind of poor, so poor in fact that my mom used to cut my hair because we couldn't really afford to pay for me to get a haircut. mom and dad had thrown all of their life savings into starting a business together, a business that would eventually go under when the south louisiana oil boom busted in the mid-eighties, so my mom had purchased one of those "how to cut hair" books at a bookstore somewhere and would cut the hair of me and my father every few weeks or so in the kitchen of our home. that was until one day when she sliced into the earlobe of my right ear with her wayward shears and just about lobbed it off completely. i walked around for days with my ear wrapped in gauze and i refused to let my mom go anywhere near my head with a pair of scissors after that incident. so one day she brought me in to see mr. fanguy.

at this point i was still traumatized by the earlobe slicing incident that had occurred at the hands of my mother, so i was still hesitant to get a haircut from ANYONE, but i sure as hell wasn't going to let my mom touch my hair again. i probably cried and bitched and moaned, as little kids are oft to do, but eventually i gave in to sitting down in mr. fanguy's barber chair. he bribed me to get me into it. with the promise of a coke from the ancient coke machine that he kept against the back wall of his barbershop. if i was a good boy and climbed up into his chair and let him cut my hair i could have a coke. i was sold. what is it that they say about a sucker born every minute?

after that mr. fanguy and i became fast friends. he took to calling me "skip" for some reason that i can't seem to recall. whatever, it stuck. i would hang around mom and dad's office after school and during the summers because they didn't have the money to pay for sitters. much of my time would be spent over at the barbershop. mr. fanguy had an extra barber's chair in his store, a barber's chair that i would sit in and spend hours and hours and hours listening to his stories. i think he did more talking to me than he did actual cutting of hair. i remember most of mr. fanguy's clients being old men of a similar age. i'm sure that his business was once a thriving one but it seemed that most of the clients that he had over the years were either dying off or no longer in possession of hair to warrant a visit to a barbershop. as they became familiar with me they would always greet me with a "how ya doin' skip" or "what ya say neg." ("neg" was popular cajun slang for a youngun back where i'm from) regardless, mr. fanguy was there each day except mondays, which was some sort of barber's union mandatory off day. as i recall he drove a white dodge dart circa 1960 or so to work, and he drove it very slowly, but it always seemed to be parked outside of his barbershop.

mr. fanguy loved to tell stories about the hurricanes that he had lived through. betsy and camille and audrey were the ones that he spoke of most often, all of which pale in comparison to the death and devastation brought about by katrina. i've often wondered what he would say about katrina. it has made me wonder how i myself might tell stories in the future to my own personal "skip," if i am to become fortunately blessed to have one when and if i reach old age.

we also talked about baseball a lot. we were both huge fans of the atlanta braves. they were the only team at the time whose games were regularly beamed into our homes via ted turner's "superstation wtbs." he would even call me on my family's home line and we would talk about the games as we were watching them. i remember that as much as he loved the atlanta braves, he loathed the montreal expos. nothing chapped mr. fanguy's ass more than when the braves lost to the expos. his reason for hating the expos with the intensity with which he did was that montreal was a part of french-canada and our ancestors, the acadian people that settled all across south louisiana and would become more popularly known as "cajuns," were exciled from french canada, nova scotia, new brunswick and prince edward's island specifically, in the mid-1700s. he still held a grudge about that.

if there was one thing that mr. fanguy enjoyed talking about more than baseball and hurricanes, it was his deceased wife. by the time i had met him she had been dead for well over a decade, she died in 1968 or 1969 as i recall, but he revered her in a manner that i don't think i'd ever seen, nor am i likely to ever see firsthand again. he surrounded his barbershop and home with pictures of her. he spoke of her incessantly and often times when he did i would see a tear or two run down his face. she had been dead longer than i had been alive and she still shaped his world. i wondered then as i wonder today if i will ever love a woman the way that that man loved his dead wife.

eventually, mom and dad closed down their shop and my dad went on to work as a fisherman and in the oilfield business. mr. fanguy retired from barbering around that same time. we kept in constant touch though. about once a month my mom would round me up and say, "let's go visit mr. fanguy," and we would go over for coffee, which he always had a freshly brewed pot on his stove.

over the years he would call the house for me just about every night and we'd talk about the same things we used to talk about in his barbershop. i'll admit that it did become a bit of a bother around the time i became a teenager as i was more interested in talking to girls on the phone than i was to him. and since we didn't have call waiting back then i was often in a rush to get off the phone, lest i miss a call from my latest crush.

but the day that he died, which was right around the time of my 18th birthday, was one of my life's saddest days. it was probably the first time in my life that i'd lost anyone that i was close to. i clipped the obit from the local paper on the day of his funeral, placed it in my wallet and there it stayed until i lost it recently. i was hoping beyond hope that someone would turn it in so that i could get that obit back, but it never happened.

i miss mr. fanguy. i wonder sometimes if he ever realized the impact he had on my life? i wonder if he had any inkling that years after his death i'd be sitting somewhere miles away from where we met and i'd be telling the world about him? i doubt it. i think that by carrying that obit in my wallet all those years i felt as though i was carrying a piece of him with me. and now it's gone and i feel as though i've lost him all over again.


the ny times on baboons

there was a really interesting article in the science times section of the ny times on baboons.

an excerpt...

Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, a husband-and-wife team of biologists at the University of Pennsylvania, have spent 14 years observing the Moremi baboons. Through ingenious playback experiments performed by themselves and colleagues, the researchers say they have worked out many aspects of what baboons use their minds for, along with their limitations.

“Monkey society is governed by the same two general rules that governed the behavior of women in so many 19th-century novels,” Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth write. “Stay loyal to your relatives (though perhaps at a distance, if they are an impediment), but also try to ingratiate yourself with the members of high-ranking families.”

Baboon society revolves around mother-daughter lines of descent. Eight or nine matrilines are in a troop, each with a rank order. This hierarchy can remain stable for generations.

By contrast, the male hierarchy, which consists mostly of baboons born in other troops, is always changing as males fight among themselves and with new arrivals.

Rank among female baboons is hereditary, with a daughter assuming her mother’s rank.

News of that fact gave great satisfaction to a member of the British royal family, Princess Michael of Kent. She visited Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth in Botswana, remarking to them, they report: “I always knew that when people who aren’t like us claim that hereditary rank is not part of human nature, they must be wrong. Now you’ve given me evolutionary proof!”

the full story is here...

how baboons think(yes, think)


the new yorker examines hillary's laugh

last week i posted something about hillary clinton's creepily robotic laugh that debuted while she was making the rounds of the sunday morning talk shows. well, this week the new yorker offers it's commentary on the same subject. an excerpt...

In the great American tradition of Washington’s teeth, Lincoln’s Adam’s apple, T.R.’s pince-nez, Nixon’s five-o’-clock shadow, Ike’s grin, Reagan’s pompadour, and—more recently, less nostalgically—Gore’s sigh, Dean’s scream, and W.’s smirk, the small (but, thanks to the Internet, bigger than ever) universe of people who professionally or semi-professionally obsess about Presidential campaigns has been agog over Hillary Clinton’s laugh.

This momentous subject began to elbow aside scarier topics like Iraq on September 23rd, when the junior senator from New York got herself interviewed on all five of the Sunday-morning political variety shows, a feat known as “the full Ginsburg,” in honor of William Ginsburg, Monica Lewinsky’s lawyer, who, on February 1, 1998, was the first to manage it. The Ginsburg may not be Clinton’s favorite trophy, but she persevered. She met the press, she faced the nation, she rode down the fox. And, sure enough, whenever George or Wolf or Tim asked her something that struck her a certain way, she laughed.

read the full article here...
brouhaha


larry craig and the village people star in "i. am. not. gay."

thanks to "country roads" for bringing this to my attention...




in the event you've ever questioned the pansy-assness of soccer players

can someone watch this and explain to me what this dude's injury is?