I long for pompadour days, especially now, a time when we are being high-pressure hosed with information.

When spied through the mists of time, the days of our youth are idealized. My formative years were fraught. McCarthyism. Korea. Viet Nam. Racism. No era escapes drama.

But what we have now is a defining moment in time, a once-in-a-generation turning point. Is it a wonder that I long for haircuts that seemed to take forever?

There I am, maybe all of seven years old, in a barber chair, on University Avenue off Kingsbridge Road, in a dowdy district of the Bronx. My barber barely speaks. Classical music softly plays on a tube-type table radio. He puts a ribbon of tissue paper around my neck, a futile gesture that will not prevent hair from going down my shirt until I shower.

“A trim,” I say.

“A trim,” he says. And then, he cuts, little scissor snips, interminable. Around the ears. Around the back of my head.

“Just a little off the top?” he asks.

I nod. Sure. Whatever.

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He takes a hot white towel from a silver steamer near the radio and daubs dirt from behind my ears. I tense as he takes an ivory handled straight razor from his station and smack smack smack sharpens it against the brown leather strop attached to the side of the chair. With practiced ease, he braces his hand with his pinky against the back of my neck. I shudder at the power he wields, for this milquetoast has my very life in his pink little palm.

One slip, and my ear is on the floor.

Then, the styling: he shakes green glop from an ancient bottle of ODell Hair Trainer into both hands and rubs them together, before shmearing this slime onto my head. With a flourish, he takes a black comb from a blue bottle of Barbicide disinfectant and parts my hair.

Finally, my pompadour. It is the pompadour of Johnny Cash, who my mother loves despite the fact that she says he has a problem with pills. The only pills I know are St. Joseph’s Aspirin For Children, so this confuses me, but I trust the statement, as I trust all adult statements.

In time, that will change. In time, Johnny Cash will become the cultural icon to my generation that attracts me and my best friends to his 1969 concert at the Garden. From high up in the rafters, I hear him sing his “Five Feet High and Rising” and dear reader, I remember the last lyric like it was yesterday:

“Well the rails are washed out north of town
We gotta head for higher ground
We can’t come back till the water goes down,
Five feet high and risin’…Well, it’s five feet high and risin'”

My pompadour is long gone, as is my trust in authority. We gotta head for higher ground. The water is five feet high and risin’.