Business…around 7:20 EDT, I’ll be on the radio with Roger Brown on Soul 730 in Dallas. No online feed, from what I can tell, but tune in if you’re in that area. Or tell your folks, especially if they happen to be one of the many relatives I have in the Metroplex whose numbers I can’t find.
Moving on, I left off a mentor on the list yesterday. That would have been Mr. Kirby, who owned the barbershop where I used to hang out when I was growing up. Like most folks, the barbershop was my introduction to public discourse and debate, and Kirby was always cool enough to let me participate even though I was about ten years old or so. And he even pretended to listen. In return, I wowed the people there with my skills at Jeopardy! It was a fair trade.
In fact, my first job was at Kirby’s. I told him I wanted to try to make some extra bread shining shoes in the shop, and he was okay with it. He was more than okay with it, in fact. He even brought in a shoe shine stand he had in his house for me, even though he knew damn well nobody wanted to pay for that. Occasionally someone would, and Mr. Kirby made sure I wasn’t messing up. As did the cats in the shop. You know how it goes–everybody in the shop knew how to do everything better than whoever was doing whatever. Just part of life.
He also used to chip me a buck of two for any errand I’d run, whether it was sweeping the floor or bringing him something to eat. He was also nice enough not to count his change. Good looks on that…even though I never got him. I don’t think I did, at least.
But that cat was always really good to me. For a while, I’d wondered how he was doing. After I graduated from high school, I didn’t make it back out to where I went to school very much and hoped to do so this year and catch up with him and a few other people.
Unfortunately, my father sent me an e-mail yesterday and let me know that Mr. Kirby passed away a few weeks ago. I’d always worried about that in the back of my mind. When you’re a kid, everyone’s old, so it’s hard to gauge just how old people really are. Even now, it seems strange to me that he was old enough to pass, even though everyone’s old enough to pass.
Til the other side, Mr. Kirby.
One good thing, though–I wrote a piece a few years ago about how the barbershop affected my life and really prepared me for the work I do now. If I recall, my parents made sure someone sent the piece his way and he got a chance to peep it.
Moral of that story–better tell your folks what they mean to you. Shit’s really that fleeting.
As for that piece, it’s evaporated from the Internet since BV eradicated the Africana archives. Here’s a PDF of the my unedited copy. Note–written about five or six years ago. Not genius, but you can feel what I’m saying.