I walked into Jack's Barber Shop on Water Street last week, because the one I've been going to for years was once again closed.

I'm not a high-powered executive on a tight schedule or even a busy reporter anymore. But, still, the time I have free to get a haircut is limited, generally during a few hours I have free during the week between retirement-job bus runs. I guess that still doesn't make me a busy executive, huh?

None of the barber shops in Ellsworth are open Saturdays. Imagine, not wanting to work Saturdays. Now how many people have that luxury? Oops, forgot me. I don't work Saturdays. That's reserved for Dolores and my reading the weekend paper over coffee and then going to the dump.

Now that's a Saturday with which I can live. On tough Saturdays, I cut the lawn too -- and think about which weeds I should pull out of the garden.

When I walked into Jack's, there was no long line. His shop is small enough there's not a lot of room for lines.

Like the one that was closed, Jack's Barber Shop features a dog, a tiny white sort-of poodle one, though, not a huge rottweiler like at the other one. When I walk to the barber's chair in the other one, generally to talk about horses with the barber-owner's wife who is also a barber, I keep a wary eye on the rottweiler.

The little white dog wagged its little tail and wiggled a bit, even though he or she -- don't know yet which -- is ten years old. Sign of a healthy ten-year-old poodle's health, tail still wags pretty good.

Then Jack, an older guy, won me over. As he was clipping my wilderness non-cut into a "regular," he told me he and his wife like to take rides to Waldo County. The pace is slower there and the countryside appears more relaxed.

That's exactly what Dolores and I do, and for the same reason plus the historical fact that I used to teach in Thorndike and live on Swan Lake, both in Waldo County. Our westward Yaris treks to Waldo County began one day when we set out for a Sunday ride* in the country, but decided to turn left, away from Ellsworth, Lamoine, and Mount Desert Island. We were tired of the hubbub.** We ended that Sunday in Monroe, the very town in which I held my first teaching-principal job, getting all those farmers' kids into academic awareness.

Jack and I chatted about several places in Waldo County we both had visited, such as the Belfast harbor in the city which has improved immensely since I lived in Swanville back in the 70s. Then it was a dying chicken-plucking center. Now its a beautiful Maine coast town, the kind that attracts not only tourists but those who move to Maine to flee suburbia. The kind of place that magazines such as Downeast include in their glossy offerings.

And we talked about Freedom, where there seems to be a lot of not a whole lot except those three annoying wind towers. And Searsmont with its Fraternity Village store, Lincolnville Center with its miles of open country, and that sign on the Mountain Road, the one that is about 12 feet tall and tells you how far from such places as Boston, a bunch of Maine towns, and a couple of towns I'm not sure are real. But then, they're on that sign.

I guess I'll be a regular at Jack's from now on.

Any friend of Waldo County is a friend of mine.

My first Maine barber was Stan in Bethel. He told me lots of outdoorish Maine tales, some of which I've included in these columns. At the time, I was a minister, back before God found out and directed the Heavenly Personnel Department to dump me before I corrupted the already-corrupted evangelical church scene. Actually, I left the ministry before God got me dumped. I sometimes feel He may have actually "led" me out of that professional-religion scramble of nuttiness.

The point about Stan and my being in the ministry that I may get around to if I ever get around to it is that Stan became a Christian. A real one, not a political one spending his time and money promoting the right-wing Republicans. Stan, a gentle man and always a gentle Christian, died a few years ago to go to where real Christian barbers -- not Republican promoters -- end up.

One day Stan told me, while clipping merrily away on my then-brown hair, that had I "pushed" him the way so many evangelical preachers sell their frantic, legalistic religion, he would not have become a Christian. That made me feel good. I was never a pusher. I could never sell religion. I can't even sell something if I set it out front and place a "free" sign alongside it.

I hope the two cultists who accosted me recently in Bangor read this and profit by it. Never try to push me into your religion. Besides, mine, Christianity, has done me quite well since I was 18, thank you.

All good barbers tell good stories. That's what I remember about the one in Norway, where I was in the news business of writing stories -- not always good ones, but mostly true. But that barber, whose name I forget -- can't remember names -- was great at fishing tales. Fresh-water-sport fishing tales, the kind where you can lie about the one that got away and you won't go hungry because fishing is not how you earn your living.

Wish I could remember some of those fishing stories.

For awhile, I got my haircut at a barber school in Lewiston, which I think is now closed due to the age and by now possible passing away of the owner. Those haircuts were cheap, and if at times you had to be sure those you wanted to impress saw only the good side of your haircut, the price was worth turning your head a little.

Once a barber in training told me he had retired from being a Roman Catholic priest and now was following his new "calling" to be a barber -- didn't say in which religion's customers he specialized. Since then, I've always wondered why a priest would become a barber. When he placed his hand on a man or boy's head to bless them for something or other, did he think, 'Now that guy's haircut is not quite right. I believe, with God's help, I could do it better.'

Anyhow, the point of all this is -- well, maybe there isn't really a point.

Except Jack made me feel as if I had entered a good-old-boys' barber shop -- the kind where you can talk about Sunday rides and Waldo County.

Instead of fishing.

*Sunday rides. You older readers may remember them from the long-ago days when the world was excited about motoring in an era of cheap, plentiful oil to run those behemoths. Our little Toyota Yaris is about as long as an engine I once had in a Pontiac. When I was a kid, my big brother would take us for Sunday rides in the Pocono Mountains of northeast Pennsylvania. They were fun and that was where I first discovered the Appalachian Trail at a road crossing, my introduction to what has become my major reason for living in Maine -- besides being with Dolores, along with not living in overcrowded Penn's Woods.

**Many people both from Maine and from Away, wherever that is, think Mount Desert Island and Acadia National Park are Maine. They don't realize that Acadia's features represent those found all over the state, the mountains, the trails, the lakes and ponds, even the rocky shore found for some 5,000 miles along the Maine coast. Only the rest of Maine isn't nearly as crowded, and in the rest of Maine I've never had a New Hampshire tourist stick his middle finger up at me when I motioned for him to not sit idling in the drive lane at the supermarket as happened in Bar Harbor the other day. If you like Mount Desert Island, you'll love Maine. Try it and see.

Milt Gross can be reached for corrections, harassment, or other purposes at lesstraveledway@midmaine.com.

Milton M. Gross Copyright 2010