MEMPHIS

I enjoyed watching some good theater and will miss it a little because it is now done and over. If you haven't watched Newsroom on Amazon, sucks to be you. It's a valid, bonafide, seriously good show.

We were in Maine and we celebrated the Solstice and a Strawberry moon on the same night. We do it with style and then we clean up. We sailed, kayaked and had a very good time and then we drove home, as one does at the end of vacation. We passed a megaton of bicyclists in the Adirondacks and that was driven home yesterday when I went to my barber for a cut of the shag.

I was probably the only one that wished that the one woman who kept almost leaving after her haircut would leave but she didn't. She lingered and she talked. She nattered. She went on and on and on and that meant the barber had to disengage from what she was doing which was cutting hair on a customer. The talkative one went on for about 20 minutes and we all sat there patiently waiting until finally she went out the door, only to pop back in for another 12 minutes of conversation. The love of my life realizes that I am honest, pure and not exaggerating when I describe myself as a man of infinite patience.

I was a little ired because I was still 4th in line for the shag chop. As the lady did finally promenade away the barber admitted to us that the nice talkative lady had been riding her bike home from Chagrin Falls when she was damned near killed by a hit and run driver who hit her very hard, got out of his car, looked at her remains and then got back into his car and drove away. A little boy saw the whole thing and screamed for his dad (a surgeon) who called the ambulance and the talkative one spent 4 months in hospital recovering from drastic and severe injuries. The man of infinite patience was really grateful that he just sat there thru the whole thing and said nothing at all.

It wasn't until I got home that I realized that barbershops are like small nations where everybody knows everybody. I can guarantee for instance that the barber knew every one of the men in front of me by name and their backgrounds and history, just as all of them knew her. I had never before seen that side of small town life and this is MetroParkCentralis. It is no small town. They were all there because the barber had sent an email to 250 of her clients notifying them that she was going on vacation and would be closed for a couple of weeks and if they were feeling fuzzy, the time to deal was now.

I was never exposed to this in my life. I find that I really like it. I was uniformed or of uniform until I was 50 and the barbers I frequented were mostly on base or on post and we were there to complete a transaction involving nothing more and nothing less than hair.

The reason the deli across the street had been closed and boarded up for a month was simple. It had been rammed by a citizen using his car/truck to take out the the storefront in order to wrap a chain around the ATM which had been featured, somewhat prominently, in the front window of the shop, and drive away with it. I needed that ATM because one pays cash for haircuts. No joy, none at the CVS down the street either. There's was iffy and didn't work for me.

I was convinced that the city of Oakland would go up in flames after the Cavs pulled a victory out of their butt. I was wrong. I've been thinking that my Memphis will go up in flames as the left come out to outwriggle the RNC with violence and domestic terrorism. I'm gonna say, I am wrong again. I am looking forward to the convention and may even go downtown. I can do that because I finally got around to fixing the brakes on my car. Oh yea, 15 years, 125,000 miles and maybe, just maybe, it needed new brakes.

The media are doing a fine media job of pronouncing the utter defeat of Trump by the hands of Hillary and so a lot of die-hards will probably just stay at home and leave the city alone.

Of course, that's the same media that got everything else right and correct about the election season.