Hey Slowdown listeners, today's episode is one of our favorites from the archives.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. No one knows Trini's real name. In a Bedstai, New York City Barber shop, he is simply called by the country of his birth,

Trinidad.

Trini doesn't talk much while offering up the flyest fade to men and women alike. I love his laser-like focus, the

precision of his clippers, and the light touch of his scissors on my head. When he does speak, his melodious voice is poetry. While lining up my sides, he drops

wisdom like Cohen's in my ear. He models for me a respect for craft.

The other barbers are just as meticulous, but they cut up left and right. They joke about people

walking in with 10-year-old sneakers, incessantly debate the greatest of all time,

Michael Jordan or LeBron James,

and raucously argue political headlines.

They pause and wave raisers above Cape clients to make their points loud enough for people

walking outside to hear. They are joyous and free. A model for me too.

I love the spaces we enter, in which we feel a rich sense of our differences,

of our collective humanity, a lightness of being.

Today's poem exhibits the kind of love and care and humor that passes through us out in the world.

Love in the Delhi Counter by Jill McDonough. At my stop and shop, the ladies at the deli counter give us free slices of meat,

so we can talk about how thin we want it.

Everyone wants it thinner but me.

A woman asked for four slices shaved ham.

She can have anything she wants. I want two pounds of turkey, sliced thick.

I never got the thin sliced thing. It's hard to pick up. It tears. It takes the ladies longer to cut it up. Here's what I hate.

Inconvenancing ladies. One of the Delhi ladies tells me the provolone

...