A stale canvas hanging over hard working days. The wind whipped it around the wooden pole protruding from the white paneled front of the building and stole sweat droplets from your disciplined and furrowed brow. Thirteen strips and fifty stars, that was your all-American freedom. You praised it and loved it; never let it hit the cracked, dog fur-covered linoleum floor as you toiled endlessly over many a different breed.

We lived and you worked in the same home. I remember the pungent smell of summer-wet dogs lathered in different colored shampoos and the Saturday morning Yorkshire Terriers (or any other small dogs) determined to wake the sleeping world. Of course, the yipping was silenced with a raised voice and sometimes a swear. You never were discreet about those. Your voice was usually rough and deep; so deep we often got lost in your stories and just sat there admiring you no matter what you said. But not even your voice could match the roughness in your well-worked hands that never faltered at a precision snip of canine fur. I remember you told me, once and many times after, that you used to transform them into high-class show cuts, fit for a king. Even into a sloppy puppy cut, you still poured your soul and your showmanship shined through. The customer was ALWAYS satisfied and they loved you, almost as much as we do.

It’s been less then a year since your strong hands began to weaken. Less then a year since they turned cold and I watched you in your best looking suit, hair brushed back neatly (so unlike you) and you didn’t move. And now, all those shining metal scissors, brushes and combs that caressed the silky fur of any mutt or purebred have begun to rust without use. All those odd smelling, different colored shampoos have been tossed or saved just for the memory of it all. And the place that you drowned in your love and hard work has been completely remodeled. It doesn’t matter to the people that live there now, whoever they are, that a local groomer, loved in his prime and every day after, respected and remembered passed away that August day without a whisper of a goodbye to his beloved work place.

He made those few small, dusty rooms into a lively and homey place where you could spend a lazy summer afternoon immersed in conversations; his history, dogs, Ridgefield gossip or just plain silence as he read the Ridgefield Press (soaking up more gossip) and drank his Chock Full O’ Nuts coffee; black with one Sweet ‘N’ Low stirred in. And you could look around and muse over his enormous Coca Cola collection that enveloped the front room (the waiting room) and anywhere else, for that matter. Maybe, if you were lucky, you’d catch a glimpse of a porcelain dog figurine on a high shelf (I couldn’t bear to see them sold, so most of them live on my shelves now). And if you found yourself trying to see into the front yard, a window with at least five shelves, covered in old glass bottles and such distorted your view, but still let the sunlight in.

I remember, when my grandfather worked on the opposite end of our small, dusty, cluttered apartment. He called it The Yankee Clipper; Since 1974.