Feet of Clay

I explore my childhood from a distance.  Observing it from Colorado, from Greenville, from Charleston - anywhere but Orangeburg, cradle of my cradle. I am not sure why. There are no great traumas that I am hiding from. I am not claiming a perfect childhood, or some idyllic movie-like home town.  But growing up the pains were large enough to teach without deep scarring, and the smiles were not so bright as to blind.
Still as I sit at my mom’s home in Greenville, I reflect on my walk this morning and the shimmering echoes of the past that it brought to mind. I marveled at the woods, so unlike the woods of Colorado. In Colorado, the land has seemingly swelled to create the space that is there. Its forest are populated without density, the gaps in even the thickest areas may be safely penetrated by the casual hiker or by snow skiers going thirty miles per hours. To get through the woods here you have to want to. The trees gather and cluster and crowd, deadfalls are fences and briars are barbed wire. They are challenges no child can resist and no skier would dare.
Thinking of the woods, I cannot leave a reverie of them without nodding to the trees. Here there are pines, and oaks, and maples, and others that tower straight and strong, racing each other for the clouds. They push against roads, to hem them in by day, and to add reflecting power to the headlights on them at night. They keep watch over you at the same time they keep you from seeing too far, bringing you the horizon and  making it attainable. By contrast, I now live where trees feel like dwarves and protect you from nothing. They are unable to grow in sky-reaching enclaves and most of those that aspire to are gnarled in the effort. The exception is the Aspen with its white bark like some pure knight’s armor. They grow straight and true and tall after a fashion, but pretenders to the faith like cotton woods and elms have simply earned the reputation of trash trees. They grow fast, spread thin, and give into age with twisted forms that huddle bare in the winter reminding me of some desperate, Shakespearian hags.
Also as I walked, I could see the red clay of South Carolina wherever the grass thinned or some earth mover had just begun its work.  I could remember when I used to play with it, imagining that I could form it with my hands, becoming a potter. I would make bowls and rustic mugs and thick red plates, but I knew nothing of the firing process required to harden these creations into the real thing much less what a glaze was. These childhood makings would melt as the fantasies they were with the first addition of creek water. I didn’t spend much time doing this, but enough time to know the clay, to recognize it as something more than Playdough or Silly Putty. Carolina clay has heft, a plastic density, a gravitas that no man made substance could come close to. I could look at this clay showing through the land at every opportunity and remember the feel of it between my toes during a warm summer rain. In some primal part of my mind, I believe that the clay that covered my feet was a binding agent for my soul, that I could leave the land but the land would never leave me.
These vision and others tumbled to me as I walked among my kin on familiar ground so similar to the pathways and hideouts I had as a boy. All around me tendrils of fog-like memory lead back to the swamp at the end of my street, the playgrounds where we played tag football, the streets and trails I would run, the faces that crowded my youth. I feel their pull, but I also feel safety from them at this distance of miles and years.
I can rationalize this vantage point on my life by saying to myself that I wouldn’t know ten people still in Orangeburg. That the circle of friends that surrounded me as a boy have themselves spread to points well beyond the banks of the Edisto River. But I know if I were to go back, and walk her streets, somewhere I would run across someone who would say, “Aren’t you a Handal?” In my heart, I know that I will never be completely removed from my home town, and I can’t explain why I keep my distance and have never waded into the complete nostalgia of her. Maybe I am afraid Orangeburg has changed too much. Maybe I am worried that my woods are now all housing developments, and the pine straw trails I used to run are now sidewalks or paved streets. I think if I am honestly admitting, the thought of Orangeburg scares me now, because it can’t be what it was. And that’s alright, there are some things that can be best viewed without perspective or without the confusing context of the present. Childhood is one of those things.

Splitting Hairs

 

Finally after too many weeks, I had time today to get a hair cut. It is not one of favorite things to do; it used to be, but not anymore. For a man with straight hair combed to the right (and yes I had to check that as I wrote this, my perspective of my hair comes from visits to the mirror which always leaves me turned around), I don’t need a salon to wash and rinse, style and set, massage tight shoulders, or even a latte while being primped by professionals. I just want my hair cut. Too many places are around that offer too many options; I am a man of simple needs.

As a little guy in Orangeburg, my mom took me and my brothers to Mr. Boyds Barber Shop. It was a small shop at the old Orangeburg Mall with two chairs equipped with leather strops; hair strewn warped linoleum floor, big mirrors, and the smell of talc. I remember going there from when I was little, and Mr. Boyd would slap down a board across the arm rests to raise me to cuttin’ height, slip the bib around me, and start cutting, talking all the while.

When I went away to Clemson for college, I found several barbers within easy walking distance of campus. I quickly learned on my only visit to Clint’s to tell the barber that I am not ROTC before he starts in with the clippers. It did not take me long to settle on Charles and Al’s as my regular barbers. They were happy men with sure scissors. They were also only two doors down from my favorite bar, and the meeting place for the Outta Control Track Club.

On my own; adult male at large, I moved to Colorado and engaged in a long and at times desperate search for a proper barber. After seven years, I stumbled upon Tom’s. Tom will always be the barber by which all other barbers are measured by for me. He was a round, congenial Hispanic man in his late sixties with thick graying hair and an infectious smile. I don’t think there was ever a time that I didn't go into Tom’s and find the visitor chairs populated by a few old men jawing among themselves and with Tom. They weren't waiting for haircuts, they were just there to gab and play checkers. Walking into Tom’s past the striped barber’s pole was like stepping not back into time, but outside of it, away from the world into a nexus of manly peace. As he cut my hair over the years, he talked, Tom loved to talk. I learned he was a divorced man whose girlfriend was his ex-wife – he said things worked better that way. He talked of the blizzard of ’62, of his first wife dying from an asthma attack, of how when he was a young man, he and his brother brought a cousin across the border and up to Colorado where they hid him in a barn. The capper was that this jolly man was also a motorcycle enthusiast who rode with great pride and as often as possible a blue Harley. Seeing Tom, I felt as if I was being groomed by history in thirty minute increments. He passed fifteen years ago, and I am sure he is missed by more people than just me.

In Tom’s wake, I have found no one. I tried a barber downtown but he was soulless and worked by appointment. Most other shops I try are operated by immigrant women who cut hair with acceptable skill, but the atmosphere is more foreign to me than their accents. My hair has now become a whore for sale to the cheapest bidder - $12 at Fantastic Sams, $15 at Cost Cutters, $8 at the shop I went to today (ten minutes start to finish by a stoic and somewhat rough Korean woman).

When I think of barber shops, I think of Floyd’s on the old Andy Griffith Show. It was not a caricature or an ideal, it was how barber shops were. I grew up with one version or another of it, following the form well into my adulthood until the trail went cold. How do I share this with my grandson? How do I even convey to him that at one time manhood began not with football, sports cars, or the latest Nikes, but with a kindly man placing a board with grey chipped paint across the armrests of his chair to trim your hair and tell you a story?