It had gotten to the Point Where I needed a haircut.

Old friends had started to ask if I was growing it out, concern creeping into their tone. Casual acquaintances opened conversation with a reminder to keep to my grooming schedule. I knew it deep in my heart when, in the midst of these many minor indignities, my wife kept her silence, not a word raised in my defense.

So I called the local salon: a fancy place with "gentlemen” in the title. They offer a glass of bourbon in the afternoon (you must ask in the morning). The smocks look like old Yankee uniforms. I like it there.

The lady on the line asked for my phone number.

“Have you been here before?” she asked. “I have.”

“Hmmm,” she mused, distress coursing

through the electronic signals connecting our phones. “You’re not in the system.”

“OK,” I replied, unfazed. This wasn’t a TSA checkpoint or some Hertz rental counter far from home. What business of mine was this system?

She put me on hold to consult the principalities, thrones, and dominions, who, after a little more than a minute, decided it was all right to accept my appointment even if I wasn’t in this system. Now, if I’d just read off my credit card information and expiration, the three-digit code on the back, and my zip, we’d be all set for a haircut.

“I’d love to,” I lied, adding, more truthfully, “but I’m in the car at the moment.”

“Hmmm ... unfortunately, I need a credit card to book it in the system.”

The system, indeed. Just when I'd passed its test, its ghost reached out to halt my progress. Deus ex machina. Spiritus systema.

It was one indignity too many, so I thanked her for her time and turned my eyes to look for a red, white, and blue barber’s pole—that symbol of the trade dating to at least the Renaissance, when the three colors indicated a customer could be bled (red) of ill humors, get a tooth (white) pulled, or settle for a shave (that’s blue, for some reason) on the premises. Signs were important. There were no smartphones back then.

“Did you know you can’t order a beer from a human in Newark Airport?” I asked over the polished dark wood of the bar, its square dimensions anchored at center by a handsome series of pillars and arches. Bruce shook his head in disgust for the brave new world out there.

“It's unbelievable,” I told him, and it was. I’d been unexpectedly stranded by an Amtrak system breakdown on a recent assignment when I tried to escape from New York via New Jersey.

Past airport security, the end of my struggles was within sight. I thought I’d reward myself with a beer, but the bartender told me I’d have to use the iPad. I’d tried, I told Bruce, and I sort of had, dutifully punching in my credit card, expiration, three-digit code, and zip, but by the time the machine asked for my cell and email address, I rebelled and went to the next place, where once again the human beings behind the counter apologized for the inconvenience. “You’ll need to put it through the system.” He nudged the screen, wrapped in grubby blue rubber, toward me.

Union Street Pub is a break from all that. Here, Bruce uses an old-fashioned technique called remembering the locals and greets them with a big hello and their regular drink, even if he can't quite recall their Christian name.

Union Street Pub first opened its doors when Ronald Reagan was in his second term, in a building George Washington once visited. In 1986, the Old Town neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia, just south across the Potomac from the capital, wasn’t yet peppered with multi-million dollar condos. Back then, the bar and restaurant stood next to the dilapidated buildings that housed rifles, grenades, and machine guns for the world’s largest private arms dealer.

Bruce, 61, has been here since the doors opened. The first time I walked in, he called out to one of our party on a cold December weeknight, “Are you Steve’s son?”

My pal nodded, surprised. “Your father used to come in here every week with his pals, decades ago,” Bruce laughed, smiling. “You look just like him.” Our first night at Union Street Pub, we stayed until the lights came on.

The booths at Union Street are handsome and classic, built into the wall, decorated with coat hooks and mirrors that make the room feel bigger, lit with hanging lanterns that emit that orange-yellow glow, dim but warm. Corner booths are walled in, except for a small entrance you can scoot in or out of—the circular tables for six or more friends, cozy as they like.

“You know I met Faye in that booth over there?” an old friend asked me, ten Christmases after my first visit.

“I was on a double date my friends had set up,” he continued, gesturing toward the booth behind us. “It was awful,” he laughed. “No chemistry at all.” On a trip to the men’s room, he’d heard an infectious laugh from the corner and put eyes on its beautiful young source. “I ditched my date,” he chuckles. James and Faye were married at St. Mary’s, just a few blocks away, 21 years ago. The night I heard this story, he asked Bruce to send a round over to the strangers sitting in that booth that called those memories back to the present.

There are two simple computers behind the bar. It’s an older system I recognized from when I spent a decade tending bar. In those days, those computers and the TVs were the only screens around, and even the flatscreen on the wall served a social purpose, uniting patrons' attention on this or that team’s feats or failures.

Even then, they were distracting. Give thanks for the rare pub that refuses the trend and that accepts the sacrifice they make by missing out on the crowds watching the big game.

You didn’t have to talk to your bartender or anyone at all really, but then you’d have to be at peace with your own counsel. Some customers were. Others would sometimes forget the bartender had ears at all. I heard a lot of secrets in the year I spent pouring drinks for the married women of my hometown.

Have you ever driven an old truck with a broken stereo? It’s an inconvenience, maddening at first, but the silence grows on even the busiest mind. It stokes a sympathy for the quiet Americans who mourned the first radios installed in cars, and even those who longed for the days when men traveled quietly by horse.

Their complaints probably sounded simple to young men in a hurry. It's all different now, and good-natured men do well to mourn it. Choose your bar right, and you can preserve it.

Christopher Bedford is the senior editor for politics and Washington correspondent for Blaze Media. He is a Claremont Lincoln Fellow, a Hillsdale Pulliam fellow, and a Madison fellow. He tended bar for 10 years.