Grief sometimes doesn’t knock on the door. She just slips in when we least expect her. We all know something about loss and goodbyes and changes everywhere. Sometimes we lose health--breasts, prostates, disabilities and we grieve. Sometimes our kids go off the college and rattling around the empty house we grieve. Saying goodbye to parents and friends turns us inside out. There must be enormous grief from all those left behind after 900,000 have died from this cursed virus. We get scared when we read the headlines and wonder about our country. Isn’t this a grief? I often think the rage and anger of the last few years is grief bottled up, poured out, irate. Sometimes eating holes in our hearts.
Joe's gone
I met a friend the other day who said, “I’ve got to get a haircut.” Having little hair but still it must be cut—I said, “Even I have to get my hair cut.” “Who do you go to?” He asked. “I go to a guy in Central and he’s great.” “Joe? He died last week.” “Joe died. I can’t believe that. I loved just talking to him. It is hard for me to believe that he is gone.”
Since then I have thought of Joe and that he has gone. Not that close in many ways but he was my barber. And one my visits to his Barber chair barber chair we talked about everything. Well, almost everything. We were poles apart politically so we tip-toed away from that topic. But we talked about everything else. Sports. The weather. Hair and lack of hair. His sister so sick. Religion and what it meant to him. How his wife did Income tax for a lot of people. That they had been married for 55 years. That he had taught school all over our county and was Principal more than once.
The Barber
He told me he got his barber license when he was 14. Proudly he said that at that time he was the youngest practicing barber in South Carolina. When he retired from teaching he didn’t really retire. He owned the Clemson House Barber Shop and that long line that came in week after week—came to sit in Joe’s chair.
Word came that the University was going to tear down the Clemson House which was a Clemson landmark. He told me the last day when we would have to close his shop. Hmm I thought. This would be a great story. So I called The Greenville News and told them there was a powerful story about the closing of the Clemson House and the Barber shop owner, Joe. The day the Barber shop was to close I visited the shop. There was a reporter there from the paper and a photographer with him. Days later on the front page of the Greenville paper was a picture of the barber Joe and his shop and an extraordinary story.
Joe moves his shop
Joe wasn’t finished barbering. He opened a shop on the outskirts of Central. Surely nobody would come that distance for a haircut. I was wrong. I came with a whole lot of other customers. He barbered until he died. He was 78 years old.
So lately I have been paddling around in my grief over Joe. I still find it hard to believe when I head toward his barber shop he won’t be there.
James Agee wrote a book years ago, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Joe and many others could have been in that book. Long ago I learned that up and down these roads of doctors and sanitation workers and the guys that cut our grass and old men whose sons would bring them in to sit in Joe’s chair for a haircut Forget the headlines for the moment. Pause and think of all those others out there whose fingerprints are on our lives. I tip my hat to that number who have helped so many of us through the years. And especially today I remember a guy named Joe.
Joe Tankersley
JAnuary 10, 1944 - January 22, 2022
--Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com
