Once a month I crave a “x” of Dante. Not the Dante who wrote the Divine Comedy, but Dante, a barber in my village. After having lived here for going on three years, I have a regular, quasi-religious ritual. Dante the barber cuts my hair sometime during the third week of each month.

With my extent of baldness, the whole process has not, in many years, required more than ten minutes of someone shoving an electric shaver around my head. In Seattle, years ago, one worker in a local chain barbershop did the job in 90 seconds at.