Opening paragraphs............

 

I never put up a barber pole or a sign or even gave my shop a name.  I didn't have to.  The building was already called "the barber shop".  That was its name because that had been its name for nobody knew how long.  Port William had little written history.  Its history was its living memory of itself, which passed over the years like a moving beam of light.  It had a beginning that it had forgotten, and would have an end that it did not yet know. It seemed to have been there forever.  After I had been there a while, the shop began to be called Jayber Crow's, or just Jayber's.  "Well, I'm going down to Jayber's," people would say, as if it had been clearly marked on some map, though it was so only in their minds.  I never had a telephone, so I was not even in the book.

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership as Written by Himself

thanks Michael