I think you could say I was out of my mind with excitement.  Nervous and a bit jumpy, but very excited.  I looked at my watch.  It was 9:30 am.  RJ and Julian would be here between 9:30 and 10:00.  RJ was driving up.  He lives about 100 miles away.  Julian had resettled to the U.S. and was coming into town on business.  The plan was to meet up at my place.

Julian arrived first.  I saw him coming up the sidewalk as I looked out the window.  I buzzed him in and met him at the top of the stairs.  He looked pretty much like in his picture only his hair was longer.  It was creeping down his ears and didn’t have much of a taper to it.  He was about my age with dark hair and a medium build, like me.  He was wearing jeans and an Adidas T-shirt and was kind of cute in a boy-next-door sort of way. 

I greeted him and I could hear right away his Spanish accent, which for some reason surprised me a bit, even though I knew he spoke Spanish.  I showed him around my condo and offered him a drink – some juice or something.  He said he was fine and didn’t want anything right now.  We sat down facing each other and I tried making some small talk – how he was liking the U.S., where he was staying on his business trip and how that was going, what he thought of my city.  It was a little hard to understand his accent sometimes, but his English really was quite good.  And my high school Spanish definitely was not coming back to me very much. 

After a little while, kind of out of the blue, he asks, “Would you like to see them.  I took pictures in the barber school,” and starts to pull something out of his pocket.

“Sure,” I said.  He sits down next to me to show me the pictures.  The first is a teen with a mop of very long hair.  In the next picture, it’s the same guy but with a nice, regular, tapered haircut.  Julian explains, “This boy did not want very short haircut but his father made him.  I think it looked nice.”  I agreed.  The boy was really a pretty cute kid under all that hair and I liked the way his hair was tapered.  His hair was dark, but you couldn’t see any line.

“You did this?” I asked.   

“Yes, it was back home.  These other pictures ... they are where I go to the new barber school,” Julian explained.

“I like it,” I responded. “I think you did a really nice job.”

“Thank you,” he said.

He showed me the rest of the pictures.  Some were older men.  But another was a guy who looked to be in his mid 20s and had blond hair.  In the first picture he had kind of a longish, grown out looking crew cut.  But in the next picture, he had what looked like a very trim #3 on top, tapered down to a #1 on the sides. 

“This is one of my favorites,” Julian said.  “Because the blond hair I like very much.”

“Me too,” I agreed.  I was feeling more comfortable now and we talked more about haircuts and barber school. 

a few minutes later, the door buzzer went off again.

“Hello?” I said.

“It’s RJ,” came the reply.

“OK,” I said buzzing him in.

I opened the door and met RJ at the top of the stairs.  “Hi.”

“Hello, there,” he said as he reached the top stair, giving me a hug.  “Is he here yet?”

“Yeah, he got here a little while ago,” I responded.

“Hi, I’m RJ,” he said as he entered my apartment.

Julian got up and walked over to RJ, extending his hand.  “It’s nice to finally meet you,” said Julian.

“Me too, we’ve chatted on-line so much, it’s great to see you in person,” said RJ.

Anyway, it went on like this for a while. We talked about the U.S. and some experiences we had had recently getting our haircut and some haircuts RJ had given and stuff.  And, as usual, RJ brought some pictures from the Internet.   After we looked at those, I said, “Show him your pictures, Julian.”

Julian pulled out the pictures he had brought. When he got to the one of the cute guy with the blond crew cut, Julian mentioned how nice he thought the short haircut was on him.

RJ agreed and added, “But not as short as our friend here is going to get today, is it?” tapping me on the leg. 

“Hmm, we’ll see,” I responded.

“Oh, yes, I think it will have to be MUCH shorter for him,” Julian added.

I’m getting excited already.