Orphaned Heirlooms

Orphaned Heirlooms.Lot No. 1 — Shaving Brush
As long as I can remember, the shaving brush sat by the sink.
It moved from place to place, bathroom to bathroom, but it always ended up on my father’s side of the medicine cabinet. That was after we moved from the Bronx to Queens, before I turned five. Linoleum floors. A small bathroom. Everything close.
I didn’t begin by watching my father shave. It was simply there, part of the room, part of the morning.
He would wet the brush and swirl it slowly in a mug, working a white block of soap into foam—soft at first, then thicker, like egg whites beaten by hand, or snow packed just enough to hold its shape. Not stiff yet. He brushed it across his cheeks, his chin, under his jaw.
We didn’t talk while he shaved. Whatever passed between us happened through his movements.
I was too short to see myself in the mirror. I saw him instead—his face from below, his chin lifted. Sometimes there were two of him: the man standing at the sink and the man looking back at me from the glass.
When he was in a rush, there was no bowl, no brush. Just a can of shaving cream with a small red spout. I remember the sound more than the name. A quick press. White foam in his palm.
Afterward, the splash of something called Old Spice filled the room. I was five. I didn’t know what it meant to mark yourself with a smell and leave the house.
He lingered at the mirror when he was finished.
Only now, decades later, after he has died, do I think of this as a ritual—beginning each day by facing yourself.
Once, he told me that when I got older, he would teach me how to shave.
After he died, I found the brush by the sink. The bristles were stiff, crusted together. The handle was still beautiful.
It followed me from bathroom to bathroom, from city to city. Mostly unused.
Now it sits on a shelf where I write.
I don’t know where it belongs next.

Colophon
Shaving brush, mid-20th century.
Story and object held together.