Pavement - "Cut Your Hair"

The first person to shave my head was my grandmother. She sat me in a kitchen chair and tied the plastic bib around my neck. Then she took out the electric razor from her Sears home barber kit - the one she used to shave my grandfather's head. It was in a cardboard box with a barber-pole design that I can almost remember. It buzzed pleasantly against my skull as the light blonde almost white hair of my childhood fell onto the squares of the linoleum floor. She told me to sit still and afterwards rewarded me with a bowl of banana slices in corn syrup, the closest thing they had to sweets in the house. Well, there were candies too. I remember once she told me where they were, in the closet above the metal folding chairs standing in a row. I found the candy dish, excitedly lifted the lid and reached for one of the brightly-coloured glass candies, small squares and rectangles. But when I grabbed it, it resisted. The candies had fused together into a new form, a mass of sweetness far larger than my mouth, although I would have surely tried to eat the whole glob if she had let me.

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