The ones you lose

I found out last week that my barber, Tim, recently lost his battle with cancer.

Tim was about my dad’s age, played steel guitar for one of the oldest country band west of the Mississippi, was a private pilot and, if I do say so, the best barber in St. Louis. I effectively just have clippers run over my head and he’d still take 45 minutes to make sure everything was done with precision. It gave us time for a lot of good conversations.

When I found out Tim was going down hill, I thought about it a bit. There are probably only 15 or 20 people in the world that I spent more time with each month than Tim, who I’ve seen every other week for the last eight years or so.

We all have a cast of secondary characters in our life that play a bigger part than we realize in the moment. I wish I’d told Tim that I thought he was a great barber and that I liked chatting with him. Sometimes, the ones you lose aren’t your best friends or you mom or dad or your mentors. Sometimes, they are the people you see all the time and take for granted because they aren’t the kinds of people that you’ll share dinner with at Thanksgiving or have a beer with over a long weekend.

I can only imagine that if we take time to cherish the people that make up the afterthoughts of our day, we will all be better for it.