As I was saying last week, it's never too late to learn stuff. I'm a veritable fountain of useless information, owing to the fact that I pick up little tidbits and they stay with me. Every now and then I come across a piece of trivia that becomes such an obsessive tic in my memory that I have to go and check out its truth or lack thereof.
A few years ago a copy of a book called The Catbird's Song fell into my hands. It's a collection of the short prose writings of American poet Richard Wilbur. One of the essays in this little book is the reproduction of a memorial address Wilbur delivered in November, 1986 at the National Institute of Arts and Letters, commemorating the passing of his friend and fellow poet John Ciardi. Wilbur said in that address that only once did he witness Ciardi "overestimate" human beings, that being when canned shaving lather was being introduced, in the late nineteen-forties. Ciardi predicted that canned shaving lather would not catch on. His godfather, who had been a barber, had told him that the only decent shaving lather is the type that's "worked up on the face." Wilbur noted that in this one case Ciardi had underestimated men's laziness and susceptibility to advertising. Canned shaving cream soon took over the market completely. Old-fashioned shaving mugs and brushes were relegated to the bottom shelf of your local drugstore's razor-and-cream section, if they appeared at all.
This little factoid, if you even want to call it that, buzzed around in my head like a fly for several years. For much of my adult life I have worn a beard, so shaving was not high on my list of concerns unless you meant trimming around my beard so as not to look like some derelict who just crawled out from under a park bench and is now in search of a long drink of wine.
Recently, for no apparent reason except a desire to do something different, (plus the fact that my beard turned gray some time around my 40th birthday) I decided to go back to being clean-shaven. My wife Valerie is after me to grow the beard back out, and I probably will eventually, but for the time being I'm back to shaving every morning.
This, I decided, was as good a time as any to put the poet's theory to the test. For years, whenever I was shaving, I shaved the way most other guys do: grab the Barbasol, squirt and smear, then reach for the disposable Gillette (10 to a pack), scrape off the barnacles and go.
Now, I'm going to steer clear of any long homilies about our regrettably disposable modern consumer society, in which even cameras are now made to be used and thrown away, because enough has been written about that already. But having decided to give Ciardi's opinion about canned lather versus brushed lather a try, I went to a web site called Classic Shaving.com and found some really neat stuff. Not just shaving mugs and soap, but old-fashioned safety razors, racks you can hang shaving stuff on, even old-fashioned straight razors and strops to sharpen them with.
I once asked my brother-in-law Bill if he had ever tried shaving with a straight razor. "Once," he replied. "I looked like I'd been in a knife fight."
By itself that would deter me from trying an old-fashioned straight razor. But there's also their expense. For a decent one you'll shell out $200 or more. Pass.
But I went ahead and ordered a little kit that consisted of a Burma Shave mug, a brush and a cake of shaving soap. And while since I was on the site anyway and am frequently a victim of the shopping bug, I decided to go three-quarters of the way if not all the way to old-fashioned shaving and I ordered a beautiful nickel-plated safety razor of the sort my father used when I was a kid.
When all of this stuff came in the mail, I couldn't wait until the next morning to give it a try.
Morning came. I went into the bathroom and contemplated my new toys. The razor was a special pleasure; it had heft, unlike those plastic things you use a dozen times and then throw in the garbage. Gently so as not to slice my fingers open, I eased a safety blade into it and screwed it shut. Then I ran some hot water, doused my face with it, put the cake of shaving soap into the mug, ran in a little hot water and went at it with the brush until I had whipped up a mugful of satisfying, thick foam. I then daubed this lather all over my face with the brush and, hefty razor in hand, shaved.
Ciardi was absolutely correct. I never had a closer shave in my life. In fact, as I toweled off my face and splashed on a little aftershave once I was finished, it occurred to me that I had just turned what is normally an unconsidered daily personal-care chore into something of an aesthetic experience.
I'm taking it to the next level: I've already ordered some special bay rum-scented shaving soap, and come my birthday I'm thinking of asking my wife for one of those special shaving-equipment racks and maybe even a beautiful safety razor with a blue ceramic handle or something.
In other words, I've begun to treat shaving as a hobby, not a chore. And you what? I like it. I look forward to shaving now.
Naturally this got me thinking about some other quality-of-life issues, as the pop psychologists and copycat journalists like to call them nowadays. Some years ago my dad and I were sitting on the porch doing our Statler and Waldorf routine, (if you remember the two old geezers from The Muppet Show) when Dad asked me for the time. That day I happened to be carrying a pocket watch, not wearing a wristwatch. I pulled it out of my pocket and flipped it open. "It's 1:15," I told him. That got him started on what an aeshetic experience (he didn't use the word "aesthetic" but I knew what he meant) was even asking for the time in the old days when he was growing up. Wristwatches didn't begin to supplant pocket watches until World War I, about the time my father was born. In his youth if you asked somebody the time, there followed the leisurely ritual of reaching into the pocket and pulling out what was as often as not a lovely thing to behold, a watch that was a work of art, perhaps engraved; perhaps encased in gold or silver. Then, if it was the kind of watch with a cover, there was the deliciously satisfying moment of watching (and hearing) it click open, then to reveal what was as often as not a lovely face and carefully-designed hands meant to convey beauty, charm and grace as well as the fact that it was 1:15.
Nowadays, I'm told, the younger generation has dispensed with watches entirely. You want to know the time, you whip out your cell phone and it tells you in a nice, sterile digital readout. It's certainly efficient to be able to talk, type, take pictures, access the Internet and get the time all from one little device, but it seems to me that something has also been lost along the way somewhere.
And of course nobody writes letters any more. E-mail. Texting. And why not? they're instantaneous and therefore deliver instant gratification. They've also given us a world in which everybody under thirty communicates like this: "OMG! Brandons here & wr going out fr latte's! CUL."
Now, as the Bush-haters have been telling us for four years now, if you don't see that something's wrong, you're not paying attention.
And it isn't just that we're sinking into a moronic morass of babbling stoopidness, although that case can and has been made. My rediscovery of old-fashioned shaving brought with it a realization that what could, and once was, one of life's pleasures had been reduced by efficiency into something perfunctory and sterile. The same with checking what time it is.
And what about sitting down at a real desk made of wood, with a clean-shiny surface, extracting a fine sheet of stationery from a box elegantly-designed to convey a sense pleasing to the eye and touch, and slowly writing a message to a friend with a fountain pen, filled with satisfying dark-blue ink and itself designed to please the eye as well as the hand, and then slipping that message into an envelope, putting a stamp on it and walking down to the mailbox? This could get us into that whole debate about whether or not gift cards are acceptable presents, but somehow when I receive a written letter (which I almost never do any more) I feel gratified to an extent that I don't feel when an e-mail pops into my inbox. Someone actually went to the trouble of getting out pen-and-paper for me, then turning the result over to the United States Postal Service to be delivered to my door? How flattering. And isn't that sad? We once took such things as much for granted as we now do text-messaging, but in this wired-up world of nanosecond-quick communication, a genuine letter, dissed in current American patois as "snailmail," has become an event to be appreciated.
The personal touch. Remember that? I think this afternoon I'm going to bust out the old Montblanc I got for Christmas many years ago. I still have some ink for it somewhere. If I can't think of anyone else to write to, well then, maybe I'll sit right down and write myself a letter. And pretend it came from you.
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