815: How I Learned to Shave
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How did Ira learn to shave from his dad?
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 would remember it. I wanted to remember it. I wanted it to mean something. Like some kind of boy becomes a man right of passage. Though I have to say that kind of sentimentality is more my personality than my dad's. I doubt he felt anything of the 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 man's whiskers that needed softening, so I wondered if he knew what he was talking about.
He showed me how to hold a razor, the length of the strokes. When it 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. What stands out most about this memory is how few I have that are like it, of 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 didn't have much feeling for what a 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 learn 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. I was worried that he'd be hurt that I'd think that, or that I would say it publicly. But 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 last year at 90 with dementia. It's weird watching somebody with your same body, your same roll of fat around their stomach, same hands, same fingers, same skin, go gray and stop breathing.
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. He 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 that 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 just pulls away from other people in all kinds of situations. I feel so much more comfortable when I'm alone. That kind of thing isolated my dad from people who cared about him, from love and experiences that he could have had. And it's done that to me as well, at times. When was the day he taught me that?
I think most of what we learn from our parents, they never intended for us to learn. The stuff just shows up inside of us, like a virus. One that they never meant to transmit, and we didn't mean to catch. Then we look up, later, and they're in us. While we watch them, on morphine, struggling with their breathing. And after they're gone as well. Today on our show, we have stories where kids grapple with their dad's legacies. Stuff about them, consciously and unconsciously, good and bad, that they left behind. Okay, for this next line, I have an old recording of my dad.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
How did Ira learn to shave from his dad?
0:01–4:24
2
What surprising revelation did Jackie have about the Trapper Keeper inventor?
4:24–11:26
3
What legacy did John Wyant leave behind?
11:26–14:29
4
How did the Trapper Keeper come to be?
14:29–18:27
5
What are the family dynamics surrounding the Trapper Keeper's invention?
18:27–35:59
6
What did Rick McIntyre observe about wolves?
35:59–43:39
7
What challenges did Wolf 8 face in the wild?
43:39–59:01