Haircut

When my hair began to grow passed my ears, it was time for a hair cut. Pop Pop usually took me. We jumped into his maroon Buick LaSabre and made our way to the barber shop near downtown Southington, the same place he had been going to get his hair cut for the past twenty years. Pop Pop didn't get many haircuts anymore, but every once in a while, sitting side by side, we both had our 'ears lowered' together.

The barber shop wasn't far.

"All these buildings here," Pop Pop explained after we parked, leaning forward and peering out the windshield. "They all used to be manufacturing businesses. Big time operations."

Now, all the two-story brick buildings were empty, they had been for years, a relic of the not-too-distant past of Connecticut's industry and manufacturing era.

The barber shop stood across the street from the weathered bricks and boarded up windows of the old buildings. A small brook dumped out under the road beside the shop, in the middle of the quiet street, centered between a liqueur store on one end of the road and a butcher shop on the other, both in sight from the sidewalk where Pop Pop parked.