Reflection. Nostalgia. Sentiment.

You're probably thinking this is a Valentine's Day post if you've read the title and considered the date, but you'd be wrong. No, this post is much more significant, to me at least, and it all starts with one simple fact: I'm getting older. I think I've said that before and this is only my fifth blog entry; but it's true, I am getting older and it's starting to show. And not just because I find myself repeating things. I'm talking about actual physical change here.

The truth is, I'm scared of getting old because death is my greatest fear; the irony is that death is inevitable. It is the only thing any of us are guaranteed in life. Isn't that some shit? But it terrifies me, death does. Life is a beautiful thing. Even on my lousiest days I'd rather be alive than cease to exist. I'd rather spend the next 50 years trudging through rancid manure  than keel over and die today. That's the truth. To no longer live, to no longer see the sky or the trees or the animals, to no longer feel air filling my lungs, those are the pieces of true tragedy. But they are things we all will face. And I've started to come to grips with that because of a recent trip to the barber shop. I'm sorry to disappoint you but this will not be the script for the next Ice Cube movie, he doesn't cut hair at Sal's in Jamaica Plain.

So I'm at the barber, my chin pressed down to my chest, my eyes are closed, the air smells like shaving cream and disinfectant, but it's familiar and comforting. Snip, snip, I hear the scissors repeating over and over across my head. The TV is on in the background and I hear President Obama addressing the needs of our country for a better future. I slowly open my eyes to adjust my head for Nacer, my barber, and I see in my lap a pile of hair. A combination of salt and pepper, still damp from the spray bottle. In an instant I recognized the hair, and though it is my own, I swear it belongs to someone else. How could this hair be  mine when it looks exactly the way I remember my father's? I can picture his coarse salt and pepper from when I was a child so clearly. The way it felt when I gave him noogies when we wrestled in the living room. The way it stood up, all big and puffy, in the mornings when he'd make us breakfast. His hair was such a part of him. It was a prominent feature in his appearance, and something that I hold on to as a memory of my childhood, of a time that I was blessed to be in the presence of my dad, one of the world's most wonderful human beings.

I have many memories of going to the barber with Dad when I was a child. The shop had all the same smells and sounds I find at Sal's today, even the same jar of lollipops beside the cash register. I'd watch his hair collect on the checkered floor in little piles of black and gray, exactly the way mine does today. The same combination of color, the same texture, the same little swirls of hair. Could it be that the man I admired and idolized as a child, the very same man who lived my greatest fear 12 years ago this month, is the man that I'm becoming? If I'm growing up to be like Dad, then maybe getting older isn't so bad.  I can only hope that age will make me half the man that I knew him to be...