Dear Class of 2021,
When I was a young graduate student with untrammeled locks, blissfully unaware of the impending grayness in the future, I frequented a barbershop for $8 haircuts. Even with tips, it was half the price of Supercuts. It was owned by Joe Feldman, a friendly old man in Squirrel Hill, a quaint hilly neighborhood in Pittsburgh with coffee houses and indie movie-theaters nestled in among churches and synagogues. There were no appointments at the barbershop. You just showed up, took your place in line, settled in a chair with a book during the long waits and people-watched. Like Mister Rogers, Harry’s Barber Shoppe, as it was called, was an unusual treasure and a slowly vanishing gentle slice of Americana, as captured in this essay.
Usually, the crowd was an assortment of young grads from the university and geriatric gentlemen from the neighborhood — in there for chops and conversation respectively. It was where I realized I had conversed with a holocaust survivor. In one of the barbershop conversations, I discovered the writer Primo Levi — like hope in a heap of dust.
Primo Levi, with his unique amalgam of the analytical science and sympathetic soul, has stayed with me ever since. I love my dogeared copy of The Periodic Table, a collection of short stories, filled with wonder, sadness and joy, many autobiographical, and all themed after chemical elements.
In the recent days, as many of my students are graduating after a tough year demolished by covid-19, I remembered one particular vignette, Titanium, probably the shortest and most curious pastiche in the collection.
A man painting a kitchen wall draws a circle around a child, and asks her to stay and play within the circle. She stays within the circle, playing, enchanted by its boundaries, even though they can be erased. At the end of the story, the walls have been painted. Once the circle is erased, she exults. Because, there is a new found freedom for her to explore the world.
In this year of online-teaching, Zoom class rooms have been our virtual circle. Bound by choice within its illusory circumference, we explored some ideas in my classes. However, such circles were always there to be erased.
Now the circle is gone. The entire world, with its myriad freedoms and its fragility unfolds, for your future exploration.
Congratulations! I wish the very best success and happiness for you.