Close Shave

For my eighteenth birthday, my father gave me a brown paper bag. Inside I found a can of shaving cream, a disposable razor, and a copy of John Irving's novel, "The World According to Garp." I read the book in a fever, finishing six hundred plus pages in just a few days. It became a touchstone for me. It didn't replace "Breakfast of Champions" at the top of my list, but it helped inform my sense of what a story could do. I would like to think that my father knew that John Irving had studied with Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and that I would be able to follow this thread to discover my own strengths as a writer. Or maybe he had heard that there were some nasty parts, and he wanted to give his son a dirty book for his eighteenth birthday.
I know that he never read it. My father wasn't much of a reader. But he did shave. That razor and shaving cream were invaluable in making my transition from an electric razor to a blade. For the previous two years, I had been chewing up my pubescent chin with a Norelco that had first been my father's, and then passed down to my older brother. It is doubtful that even in its prime that this machine would have been equipped to manicure the combination of peach fuzz and pimples that my face offered. Switching to a blade gave me a much better chance to avoid some of the chewing and grinding that the electric shaver was giving me. After that, I never looked back. I've been a blade man ever since.
Which is why, when my son turned sixteen, I considered giving him a disposable razor and some foam, just to get him off on the right foot, chin-wise. Instead, I got him an Xbox. It was his grandfather, my wife's dad, who stepped into that shaving void. He sent some old-school safety razors with some vintage blades along with a cup with shaving soap and a brush. There was no dirty book. I guess I've still got a chance to get in on that account.