Today marks the eighth anniversary of the largest scale terrorist attack ever on U.S. soil. Every year I feel compelled, as many people do, to commemorate the huge loss suffered that day. But today, some of those memories, along with more recent events, have my mind running on a different track.

Many remember the apparent sense of political unity that existed in the days following the attacks. Many saw the absence of political strife as a sign that we were all pulling together. And in many ways, that’s exactly what we were doing. Many of us hoped against hope for a permanently kinder, more unified America. Unfortunately, like so many alliances forged in times of desperation, it quickly evaporated like the mirage it was.
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This was my grandfather’s double-edged safety razor. When I first happened upon it, it was in the cabinet behind the mirror in my parents’ bathroom. I was 16. My father, despite the fact he was never much for non-electric shaving, had held on to it for more than three decades since his father’s passing. I started using it a few years later. I continued to use it for several years, until it mysteriously disappeared about ten years ago.

I experimented with several other shaving systems, but didn’t care for any of them as much as I did the old-fashioned stainless safety razor my grandfather once used. I even picked up a cheap, slightly more modern version of it in a drug store, but it just didn’t seem to work as well as the original. So I gave up hope.

Then, out of the blue, my father found it the other day and passed it along to me again. I tried it out again yesterday. About a half dozen nicks and scrapes later, I realized my safety razor technique had become somewhat less safe. But I’m thinking I’ll give it another go. I’m hoping I can relearn the skill I used to have down pat.

The desire to go back to this practice may have more to do with my having so few direct links to my paternal grandfather, who exhaled his last breath 16 years before I drew my first. Maybe his safety razor is one of those rare links. Or maybe I just liked using it that much.

I pulled into the parking lot at 10 a.m. Sunday morning. Before even getting out of the car, I noticed the bike with the fendered 26-inch wheels, old-fashioned handlebars, overstuffed seat and more improvised saddlebags than I thought a bike could hold. It occupied a good portion of the sidewalk leading to the front door of the restaurant. It was a slightly odd sight in this neighborhood, one comprising almost entirely middle to upper class residents. And within three seconds of entering the establishment, I could identify the bike’s owner.

There in the northwest corner of the place, sat a wiry, 40-something caucasian male with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and matching stubble. He wore stained khaki workpants, a greasy t-shirt, worn cross-trainers and a weak smile he flashed intermittently at the service staff as they moved between the kitchen and the dining area, shooting not so subtle glances at him. Upon seeing his smile, the thing that struck me was how straight and clean his teeth appeared to be.

It made me wonder where he’d come from – more demographically than geographically. Against the backdrop of a fairly upscale Sunday morning crowd mostly attired in church clothes, he struck me as someone who could rather easily be transformed into one of them, at least on the surface.

Was he a recent victim of the economic downturn, or was he a foreigner to this middle class world? Did he look at the rest of us, knowing what our lives were like? Did he flash that fleeting smile because he knew the restaurant service staff and patrons who seemed to look down on him were really only a few steps from his circumstance?

Being only ten years younger than him at the most, I thought about how slight a twist of fate it would take to find myself in his tattered shoes.

“Come back,
show your face;
can’t you see?
You’re too good
for this place;
can we leave?”
-The Frames (“Suffer in Silence“)

I posted this lyric because every time the song comes up on my mp3 player, I tend to think of any number of girls or women I’ve known who seem to obsess over some idea of beauty or worth as though it were the diametric opposite of what they are.

Such obsessions have always puzzled me, especially since I tend to be amazed by women in general. Often when I point out what I think are signs of beauty, I get some form of reprimand from whomever I’m trying to compliment. It makes me feel like either my concept of beauty is skewed, or they see every reflection of themselves as though it were in a funhouse mirror. Maybe it’s because so many people in general are overly self-critical, but in my epxerience it seems to be more prevalent among females. Which bothers me immensely.

It doesn’t bother me just because my attempts to compliment females end up being rebuffed, but also because I have four young nieces. The idea of any one of them struggling against poisonous self-perceptions or societally-imposed expectations makes me feel a strange combination of sadness and infuriation.

It strikes me that reducing people’s worth to mere surface appearance does severe disservice even to those with the most sparkling veneers. When I get to know a person, the visage I see is influenced by other attributes I come to recognize in them. It’s not unlike the way a person’s sense of taste is affected by their sense of smell – only with a person, there’s much more that goes into the equation.

We shouldn’t become so concerned with one facet of our identities that we discount the other factors making us who we are. And we shouldn’t make the mistake of judging others that way, either. Now, if only a simple blog post could make it so…

(haiku reference)

They just don’t make ‘em like they used to. That’s the kind of sentiment I heard almost non-stop growing up. To this day, my father takes note of the ways in which society has lost qualitative ground. Most of his assertions, like 90% of anything a parent tries to tell a child, go unappreciated until I notice them for myself. read more