815: How I Learned to Shave
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I remember the day my dad taught me how to shave, for him to take the time to instruct me about anything was so unusual that, even while we stood there at the sink, I thought I'd remember it. I wanted to remember it, I wanted it to mean something, like when some sort of boy becomes a man right of passage, for that kind of sentimentality is more my personality than my dad's, a daddy felt anything of a kind. I still think about it some mornings when I shave, decades later, I remember every part of his instructions that I had to wet my face down with hot water to soften the barely existent facial hair, which, you know, were not the kind of men's whiskers that needed softening, so I wondered if you knew what he was talking about. He showed me how to hold the razor, the length of the strokes. When I came time to demonstrate the actual shaving, he realized he couldn't actually do it from the front, he had needed to stand behind me and then reach up to my face at the same angle that he was used to shaving his own face with, so he got in back of me and sort of reached his arms up around me close and intimate, while he did that, which was unusual. He was a conscientious dad, a worried dad, a caring dad, but we never had much physical contact. It stands out most about this memory, it's how few I have that are like it, if him actually teaching me something, taking the time to impart some kind of lesson about the world. To get this kind of focused attention from him was rare, he grew up without a dad. He did his best, but he had much feeling for what his son might want or might get from a father. Day to day, his mind didn't seem to be on me or my sisters at all, but on his job. He was an accountant, stressed out, working long hours at the firm, he started. Years ago, I was invited to contribute a short chapter to a book about what men learned from their dads, and I wrote something saying that this shaving memory is one of the few that I have of him passing on some kind of knowledge or wisdom, and I showed him the draft, worried that he would be hurt that I would think that, or that I would say publicly. His biggest problem with what I wrote was that I called him an accountant. He was a CPA, he told me. Very different. Could I change it? Of course, I did. He died a few weeks ago, at 90, with dementia. It's weird watching somebody with your same body, your same rolled fat around their stomach, some hands, same fingers, same skin, go gray, and stop breathing. Right, that's me, I thought, soon enough, and I've been thinking a lot about the parts of him that I carry in me. My dad wasn't very curious about others. If he met you, he wouldn't ask you lots of questions to figure out who you are or how you tick. It wasn't the most talkative. If anything, some of the moves that I developed as an interviewer come directly from being in the car with him and trying to actually get him to speak about something, anything. Which I guess happens a lot. Kids develop personalities to fit into the jigsaw pieces of what their parents aren't. I honestly see his good traits in me and all of his bad ones, too, all the time. Biggest of those? Some deep part of me that feels so much more comfortable when I'm alone than when I'm around other people, sometimes all I want to be is alone and just not deal.
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