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part of the world, not just work in the church.
    I decided to follow their example. During the years I was a parish minister, I usually had a full-time week-dayjob like everybody else. I had to be at work on Monday at seven-thirty. I made a clear choice. One could concentrate on being
in the world
, or one could spend time mostly
in the church.
One could address the world or one could do church workwork.
    Only now have I finally realized that my life has been an unending field trip.
    And I have tried hard not to be a tourist.
    But to be an adventurer, a traveler, an explorer, a learner, and a pilgrim.
    So you can understand my enthusiasm when I was asked if I would like to be involved in a first-grade field trip. This is not kid stuff. “Of course! Wonderful! Where are we going to go?”
    “Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Fulghum, I guess I didn’t make myself clear. We want to come see you. You are our field trip.”
    I didn’t know what to say.
    The ultimate turn of the wheel of life, I guess.
    I have
become
a field trip.
    “Well,” I sighed, “come on over—my zoo is open.”

I n 1991, two hikers found the mummified body of a man in the melting ice of a glacier on the Swiss-Italian border. The early scientific studies indicated the man had lived and died 5,300 years ago. In the Bronze Age.
    Out of all the fascinating conclusions reached by the examiners, one in particular lodged in my mind: The man’s hair showed clear evidence of having been deliberately shortened.
    In whatever passed for a Bronze Age barbershop, our man had a haircut.
    I read about this in the newspaper while sitting in a barber’s chair getting my own hair trimmed. Looking at the sketch of the “ice man” and looking at the crew sitting around in chairs waiting their turn, I figured if this ancient one walked in and sat down, nobodywould pay him that much attention. He’d fit right in with the crowd that hangs out in my barbershop.
    Weekly, I go for a haircut. Not because I’m that concerned with tonsorial tidiness. I have a fondness for small-town barbershops and the tale-tellers who hang out in them. Old guys who fought and still fight the Great Wars, but who spend a lot of time discussing prostate problems and the new nurse over at the clinic. A relative newcomer like me is fair game for the tales they’ve told a hundred times. Here’s one told on a Saturday afternoon in October. Have a seat.
    Our storyteller is best described by his cousin as “barbed-wire lean and barbed-wire mean—he chews nails and spits rust.” A flinty little old man with a plank-flat face weathered ruddy brown below a line just over his eyebrows. Above that line his face is pasty white from a lifetime of wearing a hat. Add to his two-tone face a nose red-veined from too much hard drinking, plus some curly tufts of hair on the side of his bald head, and you have a joker’s face without benefit of greasepaint. It’s hard to believe he was once the town mortician and a deputy sheriff. He’s eighty-two now and occupies his time being the resident historian at the barbershop called Moon’s.
    “Moon’s Barbershop. Used to belong to old Moon McCloud. That’s where this place got its name, you know, from him. He run the best barbershop this town ever seen. They called him “Moon” because of what hedid in the Big War. Got himself captured over in France and them Germans they hauled him off to a prisoner-of-war camp. Well, he got fed up with them krauts who ran the camp and one day at a count-up when his number was called he turned around and mooned ’em—dropped his pants and hung his behind out at ’em. One of them krauts shot him in the butt right there. Bam. Wrecked his ass all right, but it made him a hero. The other prisoners called him “General Moon” after that. Give him a medal made out of tinfoil—for bravery beyond the call of duty. A little hard to explain when he got home, but word got around and people was always asking him to drop his pants so