Column: Shaving by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin

Staff

Published Wednesday, November 28, 2007

By Al Batt, Tales from Exit 22

I’d watch my father shave and I’d dream of being a man.

I’d watch my father shave and have no idea that I was studying one of the black arts.

I was in a great hurry to become a grown-up. I can’t remember why. I gave

no thought to the passage of time required and the changes that time would bring.

I’d watch my father shave. He’d slap on some pre-shave concoction, buzz his face endlessly with an old electric shaver (I think it was made by Nash-Rambler), and then apply some Aqua-Velva to cool the skin. Dad was the world’s slowest shaver, harvesting one whisker at a time.

I would concentrate on my father’s technique, hoping to learn those things that only a man knows. I couldn’t wait to shave. I would attempt to remove whiskers that weren’t yet there from my mug with my father’s old Nash-Rambler shaver.

Then one day, there on my chinny-chin-chin, was a whisker. It was about an inch long and it was all alone. Either it had been growing for a while under the radar or it had been hit with a splash of Miracle-Gro.

I was ecstatic. I told my mother of my great discovery. She looked at my lone whisker and proclaimed it a good one. I told my father. He mumbled something like, “And so it begins.”

I shaved that solitary whisker with all of the pomp and circumstance of a graduation ceremony. Shaving that whisker was like flipping the tassel from one side of a graduation cap to the other.

Other whiskers appeared on my face on a schedule known only to them. One here, a dozen there. It was amazing. I tried to count them, but the task grew to be too much for my limited mathematical skills.

Shaving is one of those rites of passage — a thief of time that preys upon unsuspecting youth.

Life is like pocket change. It’s quickly spent. Suddenly, I was an adult.

I’ve been shaving for some years now. I find little wonder in the act. It’s something I do. I’ve tried electric shavers like the Nash-Rambler model that my father used. They allowed my whiskers to thrive while making my face look like a strawberry that took first prize in the largest berry competition at the State Fair.

I use an old-fashioned safety razor. Not the straight razors used in barbershops, but not far removed. I try to recall whether I cut with or against the grain as I wet my countenance in front of a mirror. I lather, I scrape, I scrape some more, I splash on cold water, I splash on stinging aftershave, and I whine and whimper incessantly.

My preferred torture device is the Eviscerator 3000. It has 19 blades. One blade teases the whiskers, calling them a lawn. Four blades distract the brain, allowing the other blades to perform their mischief. One blade watches for cops. Twelve blades lift the whiskers. This permits the final blade to descend like Thor’s hammer and tear the skin from my face in small chunks without cutting a single whisker. Nothing says “waking up” like a severed ear.

We go through enough toilet paper in our household to keep an entire Boy Scout troop contented. Most of it goes on my face in a valiant attempt to stem the flow of blood. I get most of my pain and suffering out of the way early in the day. That makes the rest of the day’s challenges easier to master.

On one particular morning of a day that will live in infamy, I pulled the Eviscerator 3000 from its cage and by use of a bullwhip, drove it to the bathroom. I lathered my visage with something resembling whipped cream that shot from a can. I began to punish my face with the instrument of torture. That’s when an odd thing happened. Odd things happen a lot in my family. To us, normal is a setting on the washing machine.

Looking back, I should have plugged the drain of the sink that I was laboring over, but I didn’t. I don’t always do everything I should. I can’t. I’m a husband.

Back to the odd thing that happened. The apparatus holding the vicious blades separated itself from the razor and tumbled down the drain. It didn’t bounce around in the sink until it eventually found the drain. It went straight down the hole like the perfect shot in basketball that barely worries the net. I turned to tell someone, but there was no one there.

It was a hole-in-one.

Things like that are the reasons I am able to continue to shave each day.

Hartland resident Al Batt’s columns appear every Sunday and Wednesday.

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