I was walking through the newsroom the other day when my cellphone jangled in my pocket.
“Mark, this is Wanda,” said the woman on the other end of the line. “I just called to tell you that I am retiring.”
“Well, shoot,” I said, stifling a more salty expletive.
“That’s what everybody says,” Wanda explained, laughing. “They say, ‘Shoot!'”
For the last 20 years, Wanda Brown has cut my hair, which is a prosaic way of saying that she is my friend. Wanda sheared me through thick and thin — literally and metaphorically.