A big day

Today is a huge day around our house. Natalie turns 5. Our marriage turns 8. And my sister gets to mark her own birthday by having passed through round 3 of chemo. Though she's still a fighting past the life-giving poisons coursing through her body.

It being hot, I decided to get a haircut, forgetting momentarily just how expensive the barbershop in the middle of Princeton is. After reading for a while about Pamela Anderson and her relationship to her nipples, I found myself seated in the chair of Aliya Verlasevic, who asked me where I was from before I could ask him. Turned out, he was from Bosnia, as I guessed, but his family now lived in Zagreb, Croatia. He termed himself a refugee, and after riffing on that subject for a while he told me about his haircutting experience: "As a boy, I almost cut Tito's hair," he tells me, "one day I just pick up scissors and start cutting. I cut Helmut Kohl's hair, here I cut the governor's, one time I cut Indira Gandhi's. For twenty-one years I been cutting hair." My hairs sense the presence of greatness, and are now shorter.