I am home on the east coast for the Thanksgiving holiday, a nephew’s first birthday, and a cousin’s wedding so I figured I’d send y’all a wee missive about going home and the old men that make up our lives.
First, let’s talk about going home. Home can be such a loaded word. It means different things for everyone and also means different things to you at various points in your life. At this current juncture in mine, the word is most associated in my brain with my parents’ house on Long Island, the house I grew up in from 1993 until 2008 and lived in again from mid-2016 to early 2018. That’s a lot of time to spend in one place and I know it’s left indelible marks on me, both known to me and not.
I know for a fact that I am lucky in many ways when it comes to the word home. Not everyone has a place to go back to for the holidays, a place of warmth and love, respite and recuperation. Knowing that, it makes going home for me all the more meaningful. I try to soak it in as much as I can when I am here and be the dutiful son my parents raised, taking out trash and such. However, I know when I get back to my apartment in Chicago in a week, I’ll feel a sense of home there too. It’s a different home, no doubt, but home nonetheless. There will likely come a day when I can’t go back to 53 Washington Avenue in Garden City on Long Island and walk in the door. I don’t look forward to that day.
Anywho, I hope your Thanksgiving was a lovely one spent with friends and / or family and that you’re taking the rest of this weekend to relax and recuperate for the upcoming holiday rush of parties and presents. If you’re in the mood for a written note of holiday thanks and love, let me know! I’ve been writing some of late and would be more than happy to send you a handwritten letter. Reply directly to this email with your address if so. Now on to the old men.
When I was younger, my father, brother, and I used to go to this hole-in-the-wall barber a few miles away from our house on Nassau Boulevard in Garden City on Long Island. The barber was named Mr. Snips, a monicker he bestowed upon himself and his business. His real name was Jerry Finocchiaro and he was an old grizzled Navy vet that served after Korea, I think, but before Vietnam. I can’t recall any stories being told of seeing action but then again that doesn’t mean he didn’t. Jerry was raised in Manhattan by his single mother, his father having abandoned them both for God knows what.
He was a no bullshit kind of guy and the barbershop he ran was the kind of place with old porno mags in the back bathroom. His stories were always the joy of going there and often times the three of us, my brother and father and I, would go together for a cut and sit and chat with him. My dad did most of the chatting as he was closer in time to Jerry. My brother and I just listened and took in the knowledge of the elders. There were the locals as well that came and went like in a movie, guys that Jerry was friends with or had nowhere else to hang out or both.
I remember as I got into high school and then college, you could see Jerry age visibly visit by visit. His manner was gruff and, for good sport, I used to goad him on in his later years by mentioning Obama. He loathed Obama for reasons you’d find obvious. Socialism, things of this sort. Towards the end of his time running the shop, the cuts weren’t as good and often my brother would return home and even out his sideburns because Jerry did not. But that wasn’t the point of going to see Jerry. We went because, well, it was Jerry! “Ya gotta go see Mr. Snips,” my mother would say when I was home from college. It was true for more than just the fact that I almost never got a haircut while away at school. We’d also always stop in to the shop next door to Jerry’s and say hello to the old Italian shoe repair man whose name escapes me. He was off-the-boat Italian and had a heavy accent and his shop smelled of leather and polish and had framed photos of Padre Pio and the blessed Mother in various corners. If memory serves me right, he was from Naples or the surrounding area.
Looking back, these things all seemed natural to me then but having spent the better part of the last decade in the midwest, I see now that they were more, well, New York than I could have ever imagined. Sure, Chicago has its fair share of immigrant and hole-in-the-wall shops here and there but not so much in the burbs, I imagine. I admit I could be wrong.
More recently, I attempted to learn the electric guitar. The effort was initially there, while the innate talent was not, and I took lessons with a man named Bill Harding at the shop near my apartment in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village called Tommy's Guitars & Trading Posts. Bill is an interesting fellow. He recently stopped teaching the electric guitar unfortunately in order to focus on his custom guitar making business, which produces some incredible work out of Hammond, Indiana. Every time I showed up for a lesson on Saturday morning, he had the grit and grime of sawdust and other carpentry adjacent detritus caked under his fingernails and into his jeans. He was an incredible guitarist and I would always be in awe when he ripped off a riff here and there for kicks to show me how it was done.
He had played and toured with bands earlier in his life and now lived at home with his adult son, his wife having passed a few years ago. You could tell the loss still weighed on him. I never missed a chance to go see Bill for an hour and talk guitar and rock ‘n’ roll. He was impressed with my knowledge of Roy Buchanan, featured below, and we inevitably got to talking every session about the blues and rock’s origins there within. He introduced me to Django Reinhardt and taught me about the techniques Buchanan would utilize in his playing. Those techniques, far and away above my ability now and forever, involved an deep and intimate knowledge of the electric guitar and Bill could mimic them without blinking an eye. If you find yourself watching any YouTube videos of Roy Buchanan playing, you’ll notice he bends the strings like no other and, to me more impressively, he didn’t use any kind of pedals for distortion. The sounds you heard coming from Roy’s guitar were 100% Roy. Bill could match him lick for lick.
Well, I hope you enjoyed this edition of my musings. If you did, please do let me know. The encouragement always lifts my spirits. Best to you and yours this holiday season.
Rob
P.S. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying a few books of late. Christopher Hitchens wrote some phenomenal prose at the end of his life, which was collected into the book Mortality. I’ve also really enjoyed Rachel Aviv’s Strangers to Ourselves. Check ‘em out if’n ya dig.