It’s likely that this title is misleading. This post is mine, so one might imagine that I am talking about my very own good grooming. Maybe that someone else’s grooming was proper, or not. Given my, let’s call it ‘comfortable’ style, this blog is surely not about my good grooming.  Now, one shouldn’t think that one day I might take time out of my busy schedule to brag about how well groomed I am or stoop to a gossipy rant about another’s lack thereof.  No, this post is about nice people who care about what they do and do it well, really one professional who cares and does too.

More than once in these postings I have mentioned my mother.  In addition to being particularly bright, she was fun.  I still chuckle over when in her later years, way into her ‘80’s, she would almost twitter over the actor Sam Watersomethingorother on TV’s LawInorderToGetRatings.  She just adored this guy.  I would think to myself, “You mean my mother still swoons?” 

Johnny Carson was another one of her favs. She watched the Tonight Show each evening.  I can hear her now, “Son, just look at that suit he is wearing.  Just look at how it fits, it’s perfect.”  It was one more swoon. With each joke or quip, his style was to turn from the camera and look at various sidekicks,  Ed or Doc, to seek their reaction. When he did, mom would say, “just look at his haircut.”  After that she would comment that he kept his hair so well cut, but it never looks just cut. “ Oh, his barber must really be something.”  This brings us up sharply to ‘more of my mother’s influences on me today’.

For some years now, the barber of choice for this man in need of proper grooming is a young woman at Thompson’s Barber Shop over in Laurel’s Went End. I have featured her before in an April, 2012 post. Robin Hinton lives out from Soso. That’s Jefcoat country.  Robin is a Jefcoat, and unlike some other Jones County family groups, the Jefcoats never got their brains knocked out.  Robin and I might even be some kind of cousins, but we have never crossed the path between the Jefcoats and the Knights.  The Knights are one of my family lines from that same side of the County.  Their brains, by the way, often get discussed.

Anyway, the first time I went in the shop she was the first barber of three to get an empty chair.  She got me comfortable, fit my apron, and cut my hair, all without much discussion. The place was friendly, clean, and people of all kinds came in and out for all kinds of hair care.  It was a nice enough professional encounter. My mother was still around in those days, and later in the day, I stopped by her house, ostensibly to check on her. Truthfully it was to check what was cooking on the stove.  Many of us are guilty of that.

My mom looked at me with her smiling eye and said she was glad that I felt well.  I did indeed feel well and wondered why she said that. “You just look nice today”, she replied.  Twice I noticed her looking at me. When questioned, she said that “it was just ‘something’, I don’t know, just something different”.  After we visited I turned away to leave for home, and she said, “There it is.  Yesterday you had lots of scruffy hair on your neck, today it’s gone. You had a haircut.  Who did it?”

So there it is.  I was well groomed in my mom’s eyes. The mirror mirror on the wall revealed some more scruffy hair, so once again today I found my way to Robin’s chair to get my haircut that didn’t look like it.  Robin is good at what she does, and our town benefits.

Thanks, Robin.