Talk about a win-win-win deal: Barbers and future barbers get kids to practice on, the kids get haircuts, hot dogs and kettle corn--and everybody feels good about what's happening at Our House in Little Rock, where the homeless and almost homeless find a home. Along with the kind of work that helps them prepare for a long and useful life that will include helping others the way they've been helped. It's called paying it forward--doing good deeds to help others as we all have been helped at critical times in our own lives. Think of it as the opposite of payback, an activity indulged in by entirely too many of us, otherwise known as revenge. But as George Orwell pointed out long ago in a classic essay, revenge is sour.
Let's hear it for all those folks--and there are many of them--who make this happy ending possible. The long list includes The Shops @ Station 801, Fly Societe Barbershop, Keith Fulks of Mr. Keith's Hand Popped Kettle Corn, and the crew that mans Demetrius Weston's food truck. The barbers came from Good Fellas Barber College and the Arkansas College of Barbering, folks you can count on.
Michael Hutchins, who runs the Fly Societe Barbershop, was hard at work on the boys, too. "I've been wanting to do this for years now," he said, "to show these kids somebody out there still cares." He and his colleagues proved it during the annual pause between Christmas and New Year's. What goes around comes around, so how come it can't be something good instead of bad?
Mr. Hutchins was already showing the boys at Our House not only to look like men but how to be the best kind of men. He tries to teach them all the things that boys should pick up on their way to becoming men--the kind of men anybody would be glad to know. The kind who know how to knot a tie and check a car's oil. And be good neighbors. He says he learned his sense of duty from an old boss "who showed me it's better to have a lending hand than to put out a hand to receive." Which sounds like the contemporary version of 'tis better to give than receive, an old Christian belief rephrased for contemporary times.
Scott Hamilton, who owns the old gas station where some of these businesses are housed, said that together they formed a kind of mutual-aid society. The barbers got a chance to practice their trade and the boys left the barber's chair looking sharp for school. "For black kids," he pointed out, "hair is such an important part of their self-image and self-confidence. Now they can go back to school in the best way possible, prepared to succeed." As the commentary on the fights direct from St. Nicholas Arena in New York used to say: "Look sharp, feel sharp, be sharp!"
"What keeps me going every single day," says Corbin Huffstutter of Our House, "is the smiles on their faces." And after they've got just the kind of haircut they wanted, these kids have much to smile about. Mr. Huffstutter notes that Our House isn't just for kids who live in the shelter, but for all the kids in the neighborhood. It's enough to make a fella proud--of the kids, the barbers and all whom it might concern.
A question: How long before this boys' club gets a co-ed auxiliary for the girls? Don't they have hair, too? To young people, not just appearance but behavior can count, and should. Let's all look forward to taking as much pride in the young ladies as we now do in these young gentlemen.
Youth isn't wasted on these young; it's just the beginning of what can be their journey of going from success to success, and that includes successful parenthood. Which may seem a long way off for now, but will be here before they know it. As any old-timer can assure them.
Life is short; so why not make every minute count? That sweeping secondhand on your wristwatch waits for no man, woman, boy or girl. It just goes on sweeping out the old and sweeping in the new. Till the past becomes the present and the present the future. Happy 2017 to one and all, 'cause it'll be 2018 'fore you realize it.
Editorial on 01/07/2017