October 9, 2008 I guess it's a sign that your hair is getting too long when barbers are stopping you on the street and offering to give you a trim. This happened to me the other day when I was returning home after buying some börek and poğaças from the local pastry shop here in Arnavutköy. Indeed, my hair was getting long—I hadn't had it cut since going to Ed's on Wayland Avenue in Providence last June. Ed's is a great place—he's probably the best barber I've ever had. Last year, when I was living in New York, I continued to get my hair cut at Ed's, heading back to Rhode Island every few months or so. But I'm not really in a position to do that now, and I figured that getting accosted like this was probably a sign—maybe he was a good barber. To tell you the truth, I've never been wild about getting my hair cut in Turkey. During the course of seven years living here in the nineties, I don't think I ever once was happy with a haircut. Not everyone was up to the task. People got nervous, I think, and were maybe a bit too tentative, reluctant to put their imprint on my head. And then, looking around, I see that most guys here don't have very good haircuts—usually cut quite short, with lots of gel smeared on top. In Russia, on the other hand, I almost always like the way people cut my hair. The barbers are always women, usually wearing identical smocks working two or three to a shop. Like so much else in the former Soviet Union, haircutting has been quite standardized there, and every haircut I get there resembles the others. The women are all serious, professional. Prior to coming here from Russia two weeks ago I'd planned on getting my hair cut, but just didn't get around to it. There was just too much else going on. But yesterday, after sending off another pack of applications to my Dad, I felt like cleaning myself up a bit. I bought a few shirts and a pair of shoes, and by the time I got back to Arnavutköy I felt it would be good to visit the near-toothless man who had offered to cut my hair the day before. But first I wanted to check out the competition. There are three barbers nearby, and I thought it was the least I could do to pass by their shops and see what they looked like. They were pretty much similar to the other shop, and in any case were closed. Obviously, it was fate—I headed down the hill and found the guy who'd come up to me the day before and said 'shall we cut it?' Ömer agreed, and followed me into the shop. The shop is owned by Adil, an imposing bald man with a white beard and jet black eyebrows who likes to hold forth with political discussions. Ömer immediately went to work with a pair of scissors—a reassuring sign, as my bad barbers here had always been partisans of electric razors. Adil, meanwhile, forced Ömer to stop a couple of times so that I could better pay attention to him while he lectured me. We were talking about the death penalty. A few years ago, Turkey got rid of the death penalty as part of their effort to get into the European Union. It didn't work, of course, and now a lot of people want to bring it back. In fact, even before the death penalty was done away with here, no one had been executed in the country since 1984. All in all, I'd always found it to be a pretty good system. Many people were sentenced to death, but it took a parliamentary vote to actually have someone executed. By sentencing someone to death and then not executing them, I always thought the state was sending a powerful message: what you have done is worthy of death, but we won't execute you because we are merciful. Adil disagreed. Like a lot of people I know here, he thought it was silly to have a death penalty but no executions. He told me he thought George Bush was a murderer (because of Iraq), but that he liked the way Bush had executed so many people when he was governor of Texas. Meanwhile, Ömer was doing a really good job with my hair. In fact, I don't think I've never been happier with a haircut in Turkey. He also did a lot of the small things that I'd always liked about barbershops here, things I'd forgotten about. He snipped away my nose hairs, trimmed my eyebrows, and then lit a mini-torch which had been dipped in alcohol, waving it back and forth across my ears to burn away the hairs inside. The only thing he didn't do was crack my neck, and that was just as well—I never cared much for the neck-cracking. When people get their hair cut in Turkey, the folks around them say sıhhatler olsun, which kind of means 'wear it in health.' They say the same thing after you get out of the shower. Anyway, it was one small moment among about a thousand I've had since coming back here two weeks ago which have brought back to me how much I love living in this city, the place where I have spent more of my adult life than anywhere else. And it was nice getting a decent haircut, too.