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This story is taken from Tess Gallagher’s introduction to The 1989-1990 Pushcart Prize XIV, 1989, and is copyrighted by Tess Gallagher, who has given permission to re-publish.
I recall a story about Ray told to me in a letter after his death by the poet Ellen Bryant Voight, about an instance in which Ray mightily volunteered himself to an encounter which seems now to have stepped eerily towards us, fully fleshed from his own fiction. It epitomizes for me that appetite for the unlikely encounter which Ray’s fiction and poetry awakens in us, and for which it seems we hunger in the very act of reading.
As Ellen tells the story, Ray had gone into Plainfield, Vermont, for a haircut during a break from teaching in what was then the Goddard Writing Program. I think it was his first teaching job sober. When he came back from town Ellen saw him rather sheepishly ducking into the cafeteria. His head had great nicks and gouges where the scalp stared through in the raw hieroglyphics of mishap. "What happened to you?" Ellen asked, and Ray, grinning and running his hand over the bald patches, tried to tell her. Through the laughter and hilarity of his own enjoyment of the story, he told her how he had seen a sign for a barbershop located above a hardware store. He’d gone up a dusty stairwell into the barbershop and found an eighty-year-old barber with one lone chair and no customers. He’d sat down in the chair and allowed himself to be draped with a towel. During this ritual he chanced to note that the barber’s right arm hung limp. An even more disturbing awareness pressed itself upon him as the barber picked up his clippers with his left hand, a hand that was shaking.
The barber, in a somewhat apologetic yet resilient tone explained, as he set to work, that he’d had a stroke a couple of months before which had entirely paralyzed his right arm. So he’d had to learn to cut hair with his left hand. This was Okay. He was doing Okay, managing fairly well, until he’d suddenly been taken with palsy in his left arm. Ray was about to experience the barber’s first attempt at cutting hair in this freshly acquired situation of challenge. Ray simply braced himself under the jittery hand of this inexplicable turn of events and took what the experience meted out. At this point in telling of this to Ellen, she writes, "Ray could hardly get the story out, he was laughing so much. Not at the man, of course, but at life, at the world, at this amazing turn of events." As Ellen so rightly saw, Ray’s innocence had been engaged. He had forgotten to care what his head looked like. The encounter itself had refreshed and astounded him. And thereafter when he retold the story on imagines of him the humility of the appreciator, of one who would recognize in the barber a kinship of hard turns, of unsteady comebacks.
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