Snow Day

When I think of snow days, I always think of Chuck Mangione’s 1977 jazz-pop hit single “Feel So Good” playing on TV while the list of school closings rolls and I’m hoping like mad that it will include mine. No kids. Sleep in. Piddle around. Leave the rat race to others for a change. Every teacher’s dream. There is no drama like listening to Chuck while watching that list. It’s best the night before, but also works on the morning of a major snowfall.

Like today’s.  Unless, of course, they wait so long that you miss the announcement and brave icy roads and blinding conditions only to discover an unplowed parking lot and dark school building. Then as initial frustration turns into elation, you drive back the way you’ve come, hypnotized by the snow’s cold beauty and a quietness broken only by tires on slush.

After school was called off today, I fiddled around so long before deciding to get a haircut that I feared the barber shop might already be closed for lack of business. But snow days are different for barbers than for teachers, and when I got to St. Matthews and saw the shop, the sign in their window said, SURE, WE’RE OPEN.  

The barber shop smelled, as one might expect, of spicy hair tonic and menthol shaving cream and shampoo, plus a faint whiff of stale tobacco. I’d grown up choking on second-hand smoke in restaurants and barber shops that resembled the sky enveloping the Great Smoky Mountains. As a boy, it had never occurred to me to object. All men smoked—or most of them anyway. But now it was different. Better.

Usually, there were four or five barbers but today only two, and both were seated in green vinyl customer chairs instead of their own. The custom in this shop was to take a number tag as you came in and wait your turn for the next available barber. Since I was the only customer, the tags were not in use. As I hung my coat on the chrome coat rack by the door, the new guy rose. But I held up my hand to stop him.

“I’ve been coming to Eulan for years,” I said, not wanting to hurt his feelings. I might’ve added that Eulan was the only barber I trusted, but I didn’t say that. When the barber I’d rejected went into the back room, probably for a forbidden smoke, Eulan led me to his normal spot in the back corner and covered me with a pinstripe sheet.

“No school today?” 

I told him what had happened, trying not to sound too whiney because the public was never sympathetic toward teachers who got the day off. It was an easy segue to his favorite subject, the weather, and how bad the streets were. I looked at him and all the other Eulans reflected in the mirrors mounted on the wall, which gave the narrow room the illusion of much greater depth. With each replication, Eulan grew smaller and more distant until he reached the vanishing point. It brought to mind science fiction stories about alternate realities, time warps, black holes in space.

But Old Faithful Eulan remained here in the flesh, patient, painstaking, soft-spoken as always. A man who’d never once raised his voice in the three-and-a-half decades I’d known him. I suppose it was unusual having the same barber for so long, but I’d started out with him when I left home right out of high school.

“About halfway over the ears?” Eulan asked.

I nodded and told him to trim and thin it, as usual.

Back when I was a kid, living with my mother and stepfather, I’d had barbers all over the country cutting my hair. Those barbers all had the same idea of a good haircut—a buzz with gobs of grease. None of them gave a damn what I thought because I wasn’t the one paying.

But the situation changed when Uncle Frank took me with him to Eulan’s two-chair shop back in 1965. Eulan asked me how I wanted it cut, and then he cut it that way.  Amazing. Eulan was both an artist and a master craftsman. Never for any reason did he use grease. He made my hair look better than anybody else, whether it was conventionally short and parted on the side or down to my butt as in the early 1970s when some local barbers shied away from long-haired trade.

Unfortunately, not long after I started coming to Eulan, Uncle Frank stopped. I never asked him why, though the likely answer was me. For years afterward, Eulan asked about my uncle and his two boys, whose hair he’d also cut. Eulan never actually asked me, “What did I do wrong to lose your uncle’s business?” But that was clearly what he wanted to know. He was hurt. But I didn’t know, and I never found out. For years, I had the irrational conviction that it was my presence that had sent him away. It made no sense, but I felt a slight twinge of guilt anyway.

I don’t see much of Uncle Frank now that my grandparents—his parents—are gone. Another of life’s conundrums and disappointments, I thought. Maybe I stuck with Eulan partly for consolation. My mind started to drift to tomorrow and the makeup work for the kids and how restless they were going to feel. Little did they know how ardently their teachers wished for the same thing they did: another snow day.

“Dennis the Menace is good today,” said the new barber, picking up the paper when he returned from the back room. “He says, ‘Do you want this dirt tracked inside here where you can get at it? Or outside where it won’t do you any good?’”

Eulan grinned. “Old Dennis.”

I felt the need to speak up, be nice to the barber I’d rejected. Even so, I resisted observing “That’s a good one” because it seemed like such an obvious thing to say. But in the end, I said it anyway, and the new guy ignored me. Maybe inspired by Dennis, he got a broom and began sweeping up whorls of hair, some of it mine. He’d stopped at the window to turn the sign from open to closed when in walked another customer.

“Are you closing up?” the man said.

“Oh, no.” The barber changed the sign back. “No need to take a number.”

“I’m waiting for Eulan,” the man said and picked up the paper.

Now I really felt sorry for twice-rejected barber. But there the customer sat, waiting for Eulan like all the others had over the years. I’d overheard from time to time the presumption that Eulan owned the shop, but that wasn’t true. He’d simply moved in here when he closed his own smaller shop where we’d first met. Uncle Frank and I had followed Eulan here.

The man whose last name was on the outside of the shop had been dead for years. Now it belonged to a couple of younger women who worked mostly on days when Eulan didn’t. He had been part-time now for several years. My recurring concern was that he would retire and then what would I do? This was about more than a haircut. I’d known Eulan for over thirty years. Longer than my best friend or my wife. Our relationship was limited to certain safe topics and avoiding anything too personal. But somehow it mattered.

Must have hurt the other barbers’ feelings when we passed them up to wait in line for Eulan. People didn’t do it for his conversation, though like all barbers Eulan loved to hear himself talk and could go on about the weather, as he was now, or gardening, ninety-nine ways to avoid and/or treat poison ivy, and vacation trips he’d taken with his wife, who occasionally showed up at closing time. Even though Eulan kept his political opinions to himself, I’d long ago sized him up as a traditional Kentucky Democrat, who empathized with the working man, especially the farmer.

He’d grown up in the country, after all, and still clung to many country ways, which to me was part of his enduring appeal. Talking slowly and quietly to Eulan took me back to another time, before the city’s cool impersonality and ragged pace began to wear me down.

Eulan always talked and snipped slowly, occasionally pausing for breath or to let you get a word in, and this had fooled me into thinking he was interested in my views. Well, he wasn’t. That hurt my feelings a bit, once I realized it. But why should he? And why should I care? Damned if I knew.

Eulan’s old barber’s trick of finding out what you had in common and remembering it your next visit worked on me every time. Over the years, I’d figured out how to get on his channel, too. A good tip helped, though it wasn’t required. But I noticed Eulan recognized and even deferred to his regular clientele, who to a man tipped him generously.

When I got my hair cut, which was about every three weeks, I started tipping him, too. I started small, and as the price of a haircut went up with inflation Eulan stopped charging to trim my beard. At first, I didn’t realize why. Once I understood that he thought I couldn’t afford to pay, I insisted and tipped him outrageously. Nevertheless, sometimes when I hadn’t come in for a while, like today, I was still embarrassed by my hair’s length and felt the need to explain.

“I’ve been snowed in, Eulan. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

His look said Please, spare me your excuses. And so back to the weather, always a reliable topic of conversation. To this day, I’d never met anyone who could match his knowledge and love of the weather. The man was a walking Farmer’s Almanac.

“Sometimes, people talk about the winter of 1918, when the snow stayed on the ground all year. That’s the closest thing to this, I guess,” Eulan said.

“It reminds me of the time when the Ohio River froze,” I said, slipping into my own pale version of Eulan-Speak. “I heard about that happening long time ago, but didn’t believe it was possible until I saw it with my own eyes back in ’76 and ’78.”

Eulan glanced up at me in the mirror. “I believe in 1964 it snowed so hard there was twelve inches before the leaves fell off the trees yet,” Eulan said. “It got down to twenty below one time during the sixties, but it didn’t stay like it has this year.”

Clip clip.

I decided to tell him about the snow sculpture I’d seen in the park, halfway expecting him to say something like Snow men seems good enough to me.

Instead, he responded: “Guess that beats a plain old snowman. There was one of those ice sculptures over by” and he named a nearby Catholic church.

“You go to church there, Eulan?”

“No.”

Oops. We’d never discussed religion, any more than we’d ever discussed politics. Besides, I’d always assumed Eulan was a Protestant. Now I’d done it, deviated from the list of Politically Correct Topics Suitable for Barbershop Discussion.

“Funny how attitudes toward art are changing. I mean, we usually think of art as something permanent. But ice and snow sculptures will be gone soon enough,” I said.

“Well,” Eulan said, “whoever made it had to stay out there a long time, too long for me.”

An image of Eulan, swaddled in down and scarf, sculpting a figure out of ice (picture the hair) was more than I could take, and I burst out laughing.

“It must be a lot like building sandcastles. Here today, gone tomorrow,” Eulan said. 

“Have you heard about the sandcastle they’re building out in California? It’s hundreds of miles long,” I said.

“I always wonder what goes through somebody’s head to do a thing like that,” Eulan said.

Art. I was talking to Eulan about art.

“One winter, it was so bad that the other barbers got off from work early and I had to close the shop. The city was cleaning the snow off the street. They kept heaping it up out front. When I walked out to the parking lot, they’d cleared a path. But when I put my car in gear on those ruts that had formed it was like spinning your tires on a watermelon rind.”

A simile. Eulan had used a simile! An original one, not a cliché. In all these years, I couldn’t recall him ever doing that before. Hidden depths.

He handed me a little mirror.

“Looks good, Eulan, your usual work of art.”

He took the mirror back without further comment, shaved my neck, trimmed my beard, and had a few final whacks at my hair. He brushed and vacuumed and whipped away the sheet and shook it out. When I looked at myself in the big mirror on the wall, my hair looked great—that is, you couldn’t tell that it had just been cut, which I considered the mark of a superior haircut. At the register, Eulan tried to give me my change, but I refused. He thanked me and stuck it in his pocket.

“See you next time,” I said.

“Maybe not. Next week will be my last.”

No. He couldn’t be retiring. I felt shocked, sad, punched in the gut. Who would cut my hair when Eulan was gone?

I told him how sorry I was to hear he wouldn’t be around, and that I’d miss him. He mentioned that his wife was doing poorly, and he needed to spend more time around home with her. I said I understood and shook his hand. Then I slung on my coat and stepped outside into the heaped-up snow as the other barber turned the sign over.

Sorry, we’re closed.

As I made my way along the path through the snow, I remembered once years ago asking Eulan to call me by my first name, but he never had, not even today. In fact, Eulan had never called me by name at all. Do we ever know the people we think we know? I kept stepping carefully, not wanting to slip. I wondered if we’d have another snow day tomorrow, and what I’d do if we did, since I’d already gotten my hair cut.

© 2024 Rick Neumayer

“Snow Day” will appear in the forthcoming THREE FOGGY MORNINGS: Stories by Rick Neumayer. If you like this one, I’d love to hear from you.