I unwrapped that old barbers cape right there on my workbench, and I had to sit down, because inside was a cigar box, and inside that box was a lifetime of little envelopes, and one of them had my name on it.
Old Sam, who ran that shop for forty-five years and gave me my first real haircut, had kept a small envelope for every boy in this town whose hair he ever cut for the first time. Inside each one was a curl of that boys first haircut, dated, with the boys name, and a line or two about the day.
Mine said: First cut before his wedding, nervous as a cat, good boy, will make a fine husband. And folded around the curl of my hair from that morning was a curl of much finer, much younger hair, from the first time my daddy ever set me in that chair as a little fellow, decades before, that Sam had saved all that time.
For forty-five years old Sam did not just cut hair. He kept a record of every boy this town raised, a curl and a date and a kind word, hidden in the base of his chair, so that the whole growing-up of a place was tucked away in the one seat every man in town passed through.
There was a note at the bottom of the box. Whoever gets my chair, he wrote, these belong to the families. Every boy in this county sat here first as a child and again as a man, and I saved a piece of each one. Get them home if you can. A barber sees a town grow up. Somebody ought to keep the proof.
So that is what I have been doing all winter. I have been driving little dated envelopes to families all over this county, a curl of a grown mans first haircut and, for the lucky ones, his baby hair too. Grown men have cried on their own porches holding a lock of hair old Sam saved for fifty years.
My own two envelopes sit framed in my garage now, next to the chair, a lock of my baby hair and a lock from the morning of my wedding, both kept by a barber who thought a boys growing up was worth saving.
I bought back my daddys old barber chair because the pump was stuck. It held the whole boyhood of my hometown, and getting it home to the families has been the finest haircut old Sam ever gave, and he has been gone ten years.