Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

One afternoon, my mother taught me to drive after a trip to the grocery store for dinner provisions. I was sixteen years old. Instead of heading straight home, she steered toward an empty section of the parking lot. “Come on. Let’s go.” she said, in a tone of exasperation. I jumped out of the passenger seat and ran around the car before she could even open the door. For nearly a year I had begged her for lessons, especially after complaints about pick up after basketball practice. She’d only say, “No! And No!” I eventually had given up.

When I eased out of the parking space, looking over my shoulder, and signaled properly, I elicited an Oh, look at you. Unbeknownst to her, I spent Saturday afternoons learning from older boys in the neighborhood who were sympathetic to my situation.

My mom and I drove the parking lot for an hour. Patiently, she doled out instructions: “The best drivers are aware of the road and other cars. Think defensively.”

It was one of my last intimate memories with her. Not too many years later, in a role reversal, owed to her illness, I drove her to doctors’ appointments and to Fairmount Park where she’d sit her last days in the car looking at the Schuylkill River.

It's a startling recognition which today’s poem beautifully illustrates: parents provide us with the skills they’ll need us to perform when they are no longer independent, the lessons we will remember them by when they are no longer with us.

While Shaving
by Alfredo Aguilar

I recall the nights after work when my father,
In preparing to shower, would, without knocking,
Open the door to my room, stand inside the doorframe,
And ask that I help him shave the hair on his neck
That he couldn’t reach or see, but could feel growing.

There were only two of us living in that quiet house then.
My siblings were away to school and my mother,
Who on a number of occasions, I suppose,
Had done this for him, had left like light —
All at once, leaving no trace it had ever shone there.

In the bathroom, my father’s neck would be lathered in soap,
He’d hand me a razor, and while I shaved
The back of his neck I’d notice his dark thinning hair,
And he’d sometimes mutter that I wasn’t
Pressing hard enough to cut the stray strands.

Looking into the mirror, I see my father’s face.
It occurs to me that at times, age and necessity
Reversed our roles, our responsibilities —
Years ago it was my young face in the mirror
                  And his rough hands on my skin —
Had I ever felt my father so close?

He pushed the blade across my soap-lathered cheek
Revealing a strip of freshly shaved skin,
And perhaps felt, as I feel now, 
A mixture of pride and sorrow —

I was becoming a young man and my father
Was always my father, only older.
He would often say, de-thorning nopal,
Repairing a broken sprinkler, or changing a flat tire —
It’s important you learn how to do this.
I won’t always be here to help, you know —

I watched his callused hands,
How careful, how gently 
Time fell from them.

“While Shaving” by Alfredo Aguilar. Used by permission of the poet.