The Clean Shirt The Barber Gave

A younger fellow, maybe forty, told me he had been nineteen and just out of trouble and had an appointment with a parole officer and no way to look like a man worth a second chance, and my father had sat him down and cut him and dressed him and never once asked him what the trouble had been.

There was a man I will not forget, heavy-set, maybe sixty, who waited near the door a long time before he would come up to me. When he did, he did not want coffee and he did not want the chair. He just wanted to tell somebody.

He said his name was Owen, and that in the winter of 1994 the plant had let him go two days before Christmas with three kids at home, and he had an interview at the grain elevator the first week of January that he was sure he would blow, because he looked like what he was, a man who had been laid off and had not slept.

He said my father cut him, gave him a shirt, and said one thing to him: “Walk in there like you have never been turned down in your life.” Owen got the elevator job. He retired from it last year, thirty years in. He had worn the shirt today over a belly that no longer fit it, with the top two buttons undone, because he did not care how it looked, only that my father saw it on him.

They sat in the Koken, one after another, and most of them did not even want a cut. They wanted to sit in the chair. A few of the oldest ones asked my father for a trim just so they could feel his hands work one more time, and he gave it to them, slow, steadying the shaking hand with the other, and nobody said a word about the shaking.

I worked the cigar box and I could barely see the money. I made coffee until the pot gave out and then Dale went across to the diner and came back with two big urns of it and a stack of foam cups, and the shop filled up and then the sidewalk filled up.

I kept looking at that rack in the back, the eleven shirts still hanging there, and then I kept looking at the men, dozens of them now, and I did the arithmetic my father had never let me do, and it took my breath.

Thirty years. More. Hundreds of men. A whole town’s worth of hard mornings, met one clean shirt at a time, by a man who never let on he was doing it.