Read Area Woman Blows Gasket for Free Online Page B

who were just then cruising by with horns a-blazing, having beaten the Poles in a match.
    "So what?" said the burly fellow.
    "They're going to start a fight with the Italians around here." Enzo seemed worried.
    The walls, I noticed, were festooned with posters of Italian soccer players and Canadian hockey stars. None of them had visibly
     styled hair. A tinny radio played Golden Oldies somewhere in the back, primarily for the entertainment of Enzo. He was smoking.
     That was how the room smelled— faintly of smoke, then more strongly of coffee, and the breeze of a fine June morning.
    When my turn came, I hopped into his worn-leather barber chair, and Enzo covered me with a linen cloth.
    "Two inches off the back," I announced.
    He swiveled the chair away from the mirror, calmly and gently combed my dry hair, and snipped. Snip, snip, snip. It took five minutes. Cost fifteen dollars. Praise the Lord, I'm free at last.

Buy Toothpaste, Call Dad, Plan Funeral
for Self
    Lately, I've been getting these flyers in the mail from local funeral homes that cheerfully encourage me to come in and arrange
     my own burial. I find this a bit disconcerting. I have many things on my to-do list: Enroll daughter in summer camp, buy husband
     birthday present, stop skipping yoga class, read Tolstoy, figure out why God made dinosaurs. "Plan funeral for self" isn't
     one of them.
    Obviously the funeral industry thinks that it should be, because I get these flyers, and I noticed a big ad in the paper recently
     that promised anyone who bought a cemetery plot the chance to win a Carribean cruise. Pay now, die later! But, for God's sake,
     pay now.
    Trying to figure out how this would benefit me, as opposed to the funeral industry, I went on the Internet and found a helpful
     Web site prepared by the Preplanning Network, an association of North American funeral homes engaged in the business of getting
     you to come in bursting with health and vitality to finalize the details of your death.
    The site has a Procrastination Help Center, which never actually mentions the words death or funeral. Instead, it gently points out that "people who procrastinate to excess are prone to nagging guilt, self-downing, anxiety
     and a numbing feeling of powerlessness."
    Empower yourself: Rot your own way!
    Not convinced?
    Well, consider that the desperate fear of confronting one's own mortality—" I'm too young!"— is just one of "the most common
     excuses not to preplan," according to the Preplanning Network, whose members appear to have lost perspective about what motivates
     most of humanity. "The younger generations are the ones who will benefit the most from preneed funeral arrangements," the
     site argues. "With increasing funeral costs your services will be locked in."
    Maybe they will. But surely the funeral people can come up with a more compelling incentive.
    I decided to visit my local funeral home to find out what on earth they were trying to accomplish. Two "advance planning administrators"
     greeted me graciously in the silent beige-toned front parlor of Earle Elliott Funeral Home on Dovercourt Road in Toronto.
     They wore shades of gray and black, as did I, so we were all very appropriate. Funeral homes are nothing if not appropriate,
     which is why they have a hard time engaging in self-promotion: It's hardly appropriate at times like these.
    "Funeral homes didn't traditionally advertise," Crystal Middelkamp told me, speaking in hushed tones, out of professional
     habit, "but they have become very concerned about educating the public."
    "Educating them about what?" I asked in a normal voice, which somehow sounded like shouting.
    "The value of having a service," she replied. For a while there, people were opting for simplicity, and that didn't work out.
     Not for them, and not— I presume— for the funeral industry, which is engaged in a frantic scrabble for business at the moment,
     with huge corporate chains like Service Corporation International