Guest Submission by Chris Walsh -- the one who made this all happen

TITLE?  Hair Matters? The Barber of Ankara?  ???

    What happened to the Hair? “Teeth and Hair and Love and Other Matters” was the title of the Google doc collection of your final essays in our class, the title of the pioneering first issue—the pre-first? the beta?—of the EN 502 magazine! Remind me to tell you about the second another time. Right now I want to talk about “hair” loss. I couldn’t help but notice that that word does not appear in the title of this here glorious class blog, and I want to talk about it, more specifically about the cutting of it, even though, as time goes by, I have fewer and fewer hairs to cut. What might make my taking on the topic funnier still (or is it not funny at all? am I trying too hard?) is that I want to write about my haircut experience in Türkiye (formerly known as Turkey), a country known for (among many other things) hair transplants. In Departures at the Istanbul airport you always see men with bandaged heads heading back to London or New York or wherever, ready to unveil their new locks.  

    But I did not go in for that, so there I was in my third week in Ankara, feeling a little shaggy and thinking of something my younger and balder brother likes to say, rather koanically, when he thinks it’s time for a trim: the less hair you have, the less hair you should have. I was also thinking of something a character in a Saul Bellow novel said: “I was here not because I needed a haircut but, as so often, only because I longed for a human touch.” 

    My barber that day was smoking a cigarette at the door of his shop on a busy side-street in Kizilay, the humming hub of the capital of Turkiye.  He sat me down after taking a last drag. In my best Google-translatese Turkish I asked him to do his best to make me look better. He worked quickly, the scissors swooping and snipping so fast that I could feel a breeze swirl around my scalp and ears. As he finished, he pointed to a tub of facemask cream. This was not something I had ever gone in for, but the price was right and the cream felt good on my skin.  As the mask was drying, Reşat (by now I had learned his name) asked his son Ahmed to bring over a tin of brownish goop. “This will make your hair look good,” he said. At least I think that’s what he said. I’m still not sure what the goop was. (That night my daughter Cece, who lived with me in Ankara, said my hair looked darker and wrote home that her father had gotten a dye job.) 

    After Reşat finished combing whatever it was into my hair, he gently pushed my head forward, cradled it over the sink and gave me a quick shampoo. Then, to keep water from dripping down on me when he brought me back upright, he clutched a towel firmly around my neck. The barber’s human touch, as Bellow said—very firm in this case. I hasten to add that his grip was not at all strangly, if that’s a word. It did make me realize, though, that every time you get a haircut, you make yourself vulnerable, putting not only your looks but in a way your very life in the hands of someone who applies mysterious potions and wields sharp tools around your head and neck. It is just as well we do this without thinking too much about it, but getting a haircut from a perfect stranger in another country reminded me that the experience both requires and cultivates trust, and that that is a beautiful thing.

    I am tempted to connect this episode, this phenomenon, to this wonderful blog, where you all write so candidly and eloquently about your lives, your triumphs and trials, your “Teeth and Love and Growing Up.” I don’t want to push the analogy too far. Are the words hair, natural expressions of your skulls that say something even more effectively when they are combed through, trimmed, shaped? Are you all each other’s barbers, or your own? I’m not sure—but I will say that a visit here to this thing you’ve created and keep creating makes me feel what I felt as Reşat lit up a cigarette and told his son to shake my hand and say goodbye in English: I walked out into the Ankara afternoon feeling refreshed, the human touch and human voices making me happy to be alive and not only hopeful about the human race but honored to be a part of it.

Onward.

 

 *Hanna's note: when Professor Walsh sent his essay to me to post I assumed he wanted me to pick a title for him out of the options he provided. I chose to leave his piece unedited so our readers can appreciate his writing in its purest form. Professor, if you had something else in mind, please comment.