Journal writing is an unfolding process of self-discovery, as I’m sure those who have done this long enough know. That is surely one of the main reasons we keep them, and to keep them online means we allow others to share in our lives and know a bit about our pasts. I am not afraid of confronting the unpleasant sides of my past, but in my journals, I have tried mightily to dwell on the small incidents and memories which makes me smile in wonder and appreciation for the good times and the pivotal people and places I have known over the years. There are a lot of negative stories and incidents to dwell on and analyze and agonize over, but that is not what I choose to think about, most of the time. Thankfully.

A lot of recollections bring me back to my birthplace, New Orleans, where I lived for the first 21 years of my life, and then, in later years, for short periods of time before I settled here in South Carolina.

My childhood years from age 5-10 were spent in the suburban part of Jefferson Parish (counties are referred to as parishes in Louisiana) known as East Jefferson. Nearby was the community of Harahan, and I lived only blocks from the mighty Mississippi River, then, and later, when I moved to the Algiers section of New Orleans on the west bank of the river.

Here is a memory piece I wrote in August 1998, so many years ago, it seems, but it represents an invaluable documentation of childhood memories that have never faded.

When I think back to my childhood growing up in the suburbs of New Orleans in Jefferson Parish in the 1950s, I recall most readily three business establishments.

First was the Katz & Besthoff (or K&B) Drugstore down the street from where I lived at the corner of Jefferson Highway. It was here that we kids would have those wonderful Cherry Cokes — Cokes dispensed from a fountain in a glass that had cherry syrup at the bottom. That was a real treat on hot summer days. Cherry Cokes of today just can’t compare.

The second business was a small grocery store across the street from the school I attended. It was here that we could stock up on tart straw-sugar candy, miniature wax bottles of fruit-flavored juice, and, or course, baseball and other cards with bubble gum sheets inside.

Finally, between the drugstore and the snackshop was the barbershop. Some of the keenest memories I have of my growing status as a soon-to-be teenager are of this establishment where I’d proceed, by myself at age 9 or 10, to get my crewcut. You could hear 50s staples on the small radio on the counter — songs by Brenda Lee, Pat Boone, Patsy Cline, and those classics by the Ray Conniff and Bert Kaempfert orchestras.

To this day I love to hear those songs. They take me back to the golden era of childhood as surely as any other memory-triggering device. “Bye, Bye Blues” by Bert Kaempfert might be playing in the background while the electric clippers buzzed off broad swaths of our raggeddy hair. Or, we’d patiently wait our turn, flipping through “grown-up” magazines such as Argosy and Field and Stream. I remember those two most because they were in just about every old-fashioned barbershop I’ve ever been in.
Well-thumbed copies of “Look” magazine and “The Saturday Evening Post” were also strewn about on chairs or stuffed in magazine racks with their covers about to come off.

Yes, it was almost like a Norman Rockwell painting. To city-raised kids, pictures of deer hunting and trophy-sized freshwater bass were as exotic as scenes from an African safari (this was in pre-political correctness days, remember). Occasional conversation, the pleasing clippity-clip of scissors, the sound of the razor being sharpened on leather (I guess that’s what it was) — all were noted and stored away in my memory.

That barbershop pole out front with its moving stripes is a vanishing symbol of America in simpler times. You can still find them, but they’re harder to come by. It would be a sad thing if that barbarshop experience was lost as a ritual of childhood. It’s irreplaceable.

(For an excellent homage to this iconic cultural institution, see “The American Barbershop: A Closer Look at a Disappearing Place” by Mic Hunter.)