by Angela Starita

Beauty supply shops are a mostly extinct category of small business. My father owned one in Jersey City, NJ, and I’d think of him every time I went to one on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. It’s the right kind of street for a beauty supply store: a busy, rundown shopping area, with enough oId-timers who aren’t going to order their shampoo and wigs and curlers online. That store was owned by a handsome Korean man in his forties who, like my father, had no real relationship to the business—unsmiling and quiet, dressed in dark sweaters, and waiting behind the register. You could buy something or not. As far as he was concerned, his job was to stock the place, keep it open during the hours posted on the front door, and find a way to withstand overwhelming boredom.
In my father’s case, that lack of engagement led to spells of jumpy, all-in energy alternating with sour disdain. When he could no longer tolerate dedicating years of his life to the vicissitudes of hair trends, his solution—to chuck the store and start a farm—was part of a long, robust tradition, one that increasingly pervades current discourse: when life proves empty, turn to the land. It’s a notion filled with the promise of self-determination and meaning, and while I have my doubts, I fully understand, even applaud, the impulse. To leave his business, my father also needed a highly supportive spouse and serious confidence in his midlife physical stamina. In fact, he had both. What he didn’t have was a community for the farming he wanted to do, no pesticides and coupled crops. He started in 1975, a period when there was no shortage of books and magazines and communal farms advocating the same methods. But my dad was not a hippie nor much of a reader. Having immigrated to the United States in his mid-30’s after spending 10 years in the Italian navy, his psychic orientation faced World War II and Europe, not cooperative supermarkets and Vermont. Though he obsessively followed current national and international politics, he had only the vaguest awareness of anything countercultural. Read more »