2001-04-09 - 7:32 p.m.

In the last week before I left the town for good, I went back to Libertyville�s old-fashioned barber shop for one last cut. It�s a homey place, covered with photos, bumper stickers, crazy signs and even an article I had written while I was working for the local paper that I would soon be leaving � a story I had written about hunting, complete with pictures of the adventure. In one, two men in orange hold up their guns as they survey the land, and in another, a dog surveys an orderly row of birds that had been killed that day. The article fit right in with the ambiance of the place, covered with deer heads, fish and signs like �Be kind to animals � hug a Liberty Barber.�

I had first been here more than a year ago, when I was assigned to write about the old-fashioned barbershop that was thriving right here in our sleepy old-fashioned suburb. I had shown up before sunrise when the place was just opening, befriending the barbers and customers and trying to catch the inevitable dialogue that makes a place like this seem straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. One child cried as he got his first haircut; two boys swept the hair off the floor; another older boy complained that his father wouldn�t give him a car. The place was, in keeping with the idyllic tradition, the kind of place where men get together to chat, the way that women once convened when they went to draw water from the village well. Boys and men of all ages would plop down on a chair and, with nothing better to do, chatter on about whatever crossed their minds.

On that first day I got to talking with one of the barbers, Danny. It turned out that over the course of his barbering, he had struck up a friendship with an older man who loved to hunt. The man was a member at a local hunt club, but he had no dog. Danny, who had a dog primed for hunting, offered to go hunting with him, and they had become fast friends. As a journalist, I was on the lookout for stories like this, and I convinced him to take me along with him on his next hunting expedition.

This article was not the Norman Rockwell fairy tale that the story of the barber shop was � it involved two men parading through a field that had recently been stocked with birds, and shooting those birds down when their dog sniffed them out. But it also had the human element of two grown men sharing a common love of the outdoors, and the hunters eagerly told me of the conservation that hunters regularly take part in, though I was hard-pressed to find any conservation involved in this particular activity.

By the time I had written both these stories, I counted myself a friend to Danny, despite the obvious differences. I started coming to the barbershop every time I needed a hair cut. I would tell him about some recent stories I had written, and he would tell me about his latest hunting adventures.

So it wasn�t just on a whim that I ventured back to the barbershop in my last week on the job. I plopped into Danny�s chair on a quiet morning and settled in for one last chat.

He asked me how the job was going. It wasn�t � the paper was folding, and we would all be gone within a week. But my boss had asked us to keep quiet for now about that fact, to keep the advertisers from jumping ship. So I made up some half-truths about what stories I was working on, and he asked me whether I wanted to stick around for a while or would consider moving on soon. I told him I was looking around.

While I felt vaguely guilty in making up these stories, I was mostly just as happy not to have to tell him the truth. It seemed appropriate enough � the barber shop should be a place where you can say whatever you want, vocalize whimsies or pretend that everything�s okay. To tell him the paper was closing would bring an unnecessary seriousness to the careless conversations of a barber shop, and I had enough seriousness in my life.

The conversation wandered, as barbershop conversations tend to do. I told him I was still living in Uptown Chicago, a somewhat poor and very diverse neighborhood.

�Lots of black people?� he asked knowingly. It was a subject that had never been brought up.

�I�m not prejudiced, but � well, maybe I am prejudiced in a way,� he told me, and proceeded to tell me a story of a black friend of his who was addicted to crack, and how she lied and stole to feed her habit. He didn�t say so, but his looks begged me to agree with him that this story reflected poorly on the black race. I just sat in my chair and said as little as possible. He just kept on going, veered off on a tangent about punishments for criminals.

�If someone steals something, you should just cut their hand off. That would end stealing in a hurry. If a man rapes a woman, they should castrate him,� he told me.

Perhaps he was extolling the values embodied in this old-fashioned, hunting-loving, masculine barbershop. Perhaps Danny was an authentic piece to this old-fashioned town, but I suddenly didn�t feel sorry that I would be leaving this town to live in the city full-time, and I didn�t feel guilty that I hadn�t told him the paper was folding. I would try to overlook our differences of opinion one last time, finish up my hair cut, and say goodbye to the shop without looking back.

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