Well, it's all right, Casey. You've turned out just fine anyway. And besides, I'm guessing your whole generation of young males has come of age, somehow, without the barbershop experience.

You've all made do without the peculiar bonding, the identity-building that used to come from a specific source. I mean a monthly visit (at least) to one of those scruffy shops, most of them lit by humming, sometimes flickering neon tubes.

What else can I tell you about those shops? Well, in summertime, certainly during my Annapolis boyhood, barbershops could be hellishly hot. No air conditioning back then (you had to go to the movies to enjoy that). Instead, a barbershop would have a huge pedestal fan, six feet high, standing in a corner, or maybe several oscillating fans mounted high up on the walls. The fans churned the heavy air, rattled magazine pages, made eddies of cut hair roll like tumbleweed across the worn tiles. The heat was largely unaffected.

But the fans did plague the barbershop flies. These had been drawn to the entry by the cloying smell of pomades and unguents; and with each single patron, a half-dozen flies buzzed in. ("Screen door's there to keep 'em from escaping," old timers would say.)

The blasts from the big fans would throw the flies off course as they sailed around the shop, and some old gents spent their waiting time on the alert, batting them out of the air with folded newspapers. On Saturdays, fly stats were kept and money made on bets.

Six decades later, I can still see one old geezer sitting forward in his chair, eyes bright and head thrust forward like a turkey's, his folded paper at the ready. Someone would call out, "Here comes one, Bud!" and the room would watch as the old man tensed like a terrier, then swung.

"Aw, bad luck, Bud. That bugger veered when he saw your arm move. But, by damn, he's got a story to tell his grandchildren!" And the old boy would grin and realign his false teeth, gone askew from his swing. Then he'd gather himself and wait for the next low flier.

But most of the flies, after bouncing along against the tin ceiling, ended up gathered inside the front window, battering heads against the sun-bright plate glass. The broad window seat was littered with dried corpses and with the bodies of addled, dying flies. The latter lay on their backs, trying to take flight but spinning instead among the deceased.

Enthroned in the barber chair, swathed in a striped sheet, I had all that to watch, plus, if I were lucky, a shave in an adjoining chair.

For a shave, the customer was dropped back almost prone, feet raised. As a first step, the barber swathed the client's face with a hot towel right out of the chrome steamer. While the moist heat softened the beard, the barber would hone his razor on his chair's leather strop. Then he'd work up a thick lather in a crockery mug.

The wicked slap-slap of the stropping, the clickety-click of the shaving brush handle against the mug, the rhythmic scritch of that straight razor as it cut through hairs-I can still hear them all in imagination. And I can also recall the cry of pain and annoyance if the barber nicked something other than hair.

Once, after a third nick, a client roared, reared up, and jumped from the chair next to me. He wiped the lather from his face with his striped sheet, ripped it off and threw it at the barber's feet. Then he made a uniquely Italian gesture at barber Calabrese and, pressing his earlobe, stamped outside through the entering flies.

The glowering Calabrese, chin jutting like Mussolini's, dismissed the man with a contemptuous "Sicilian!" From Calabria, the Calabreses viewed Sicily as a mere misshapen rock. To them, the Italian boot was poised to kick it the length of the Mediterranean. Along the wall, the waiting customers murmured over the incident. But in the next barber chair, I kept very quiet. Great-grandpa Ornofrio Geraci, after all, had fled his native Sicily just ahead of Garibaldi's conscription officers.

But what great stuff for a kid to witness-competitive fly-swatting, Italian drama, and all from the middle of the action! Plus a haircut. Plus a pomade scrubbed into my scalp that was guaranteed to make me irresistible (well, sooner or later.)

I just hope today gives kids something similar to feed their imaginations, their identities; something that will plant memories for a lifetime. For instance, I don't know who that fly-swatting old geezer was; he may be a composite formed by my memory. But as I approach his age, I love the old boy for his spirit, his zest. He played his part in the barbershop's helping me get an early grasp of something. In college I learned Shakespeare's name for it. The Ages of Man.

Jim Atwell lives in and views life from Fly Creek. He can be found on the web at JimAtwell.com.