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A certain soft scraping sound that I hear faintly sometimes in a barbershop is like an echo of a harsh and loud scrape, scrape, scrape that I used to hear in our kitchen when I was a boy. As I listen, with my face and mind erased of present things by a barber's soothing towel, I doze; and, dozing, slip back to one of those moments of my past that is quickened by the razor's noise. Our kitchen was the only barbershop my father knew. My mother was the one who always cut his hair and shaved him. We never spent money for anything that we could get without spending.

When it happened on a Sunday morning, the shaving of my father was a part of the family preparation for attendance at church services. His upper lip, by design and in accordance with the prevailing masculine fashion of the West, was always black with a thick glossy mustache that drooped at the corners of his mouth. That was proper, but the stubbly growth of whiskers on his cheeks, neck and chin was as disturbing to my mother, as little to be tolerated, as weeds in her kitchen garden. So, badgered by her, my father would seat himself midway between the window and the stove, on which a basin of water would be steaming. I have forgotten how the lather brush had been improvised, but I never can forget that the soap, often with my conscripted labor, was home-made out of grease and lye. With a prod of her thumb against the bristles of his chin, my mother would tilt his head and give him an iridescent beard of bubbles. When this had become foamy, she would start to scrape.