Baker Nicholson - A Box of Matches

That was this year. Last year for New Year’s I decided that I would shave off my beard because there was too much white in it. I bought an electric trimmer, and I began plowing off chunks of coarse fur. Henry watched with interest, but Phoebe became unexpectedly upset. She said that my personality had to have a beard. I must stop immediately, she said. I said I was tired of looking in the mirror at a prematurely white-bearded person — that I had no respect or affection for badger-people in their forties. If, after I finished buzzing it off, I didn’t like the results, then I would just regrow it. When I was halfway through, Henry said, “Dad, I think it looks interesting but you need to work some on the other side.” Claire said to Phoebe, “He’s just seeing how it looks.” But I could see that when she, Claire, saw me in the mirror she was a little startled.

You see, Claire had never seen me beardless. I’ve had one since I was eighteen, and in years past I’ve been more than a little proud of its curly density and its russet highlights. By the way, you can trim a beard, I’ve found, using a double-bladed disposable razor: you “shave” over the beard’s shape as if it were your jaw and chin. I originally grew the beard because I thought I had a thin weak face, which I did, but over the years, without my knowledge or consent, it had changed into a plump weak face. The mouth was the main problem: I had always thought that I had a generous ho-ho-ho sort of mouth, the mouth of a backslapping mountain man, quick with a knock-knock joke or a kindly word, but it turned out, when put in the context of my upper lip, that my mouth was pursed and almost parsonly. That evening Claire kept getting caught by surprise by my face. “I can hear your voice in the room,” she said, “but when I look up, you’re not there,” she said. I buried my head in her bathrobe so that she wouldn’t see me; I was reminded of a time in seventh grade when someone kicked me during a soccer game and I spent the day with a puffed lip and thick twists of toilet paper projecting from both nostrils. Every time the teacher looked in my direction he laughed, and then he apologized for laughing, saying that he just couldn’t help it.

It was a good experiment, Claire said, worth trying, but she liked my beard and wanted it back. I began regrowing it immediately.

Good morning, it’s 4:39 a.m. and I just watched a cocktail napkin burn. After its period of flaming was past, there was a long time during which tiny yellow taxicabs did hairpin turns around the mountain passes, tunneling deeper and deeper into the ashen blackness. I’ve torn off some pages of a course catalog for a local community college and I’ve rolled them up and pushed them into the hot places. Because I started late yesterday, I was in a rush to be sitting here in front of the fire by five a.m. sharp, and that is probably why I stepped on Henry’s airplane in the dining room. Out of a paper-towel tube, an electric motor, a battery holder, a light switch, and a great deal of masking tape, Henry made an airplane. He was sure that it would fly, even though Claire and I both gently, in different ways, observed that though it was beautiful it was heavy. Henry cut out larger and larger propellers from the lid of a shoebox, and he tried to tape on a second battery pack, and he and I went outside just before dinner and climbed the snowplow mound. He turned on the propeller and flung his machine out into the twilight. It landed heavily, but it seemed to be not too badly damaged. We came back inside. Phoebe and Claire were watching an episode of Gomer Pyle . I showed Henry how to make a paper airplane. I’d showed him once a few years ago, but he’d forgotten, and I’d almost forgotten myself. The moves came back to me, though, as I talked my way through them, and as the triangles narrowed into swept-back wings Henry began to make a purring, half-laughing sound of enlightenment that I thought he had stopped making forever.

So swerving to avoid the dining-room chair this morning, I stepped on the battery-powered airplane. I felt it for breakage, but I think it’s all right — Henry had fortified it with more masking tape after its snow crash. Then, hurrying to be in here by five — not running but moving with a distinct sense of hurry — I felt a need to let out some private gas before I sat down, and because I didn’t want to make any noise I paused for a moment and pulled on one side of my bottom— backside perhaps is a more delicate term — to allow the release to proceed without fanfare. Then I came in here and set up.

I wish I were a better photographer. Many family moments are going by and I’m missing most of them. At least I got a few shots last month when we had that very soft white snowfall that ticked against the window all night. It was an unusual snow, almost like Styrofoam in its consistency in some of the deep places, and when you dug in it, the light that it let through was an interesting sapphire blue — perhaps different prevailing temperatures during snowflake-growth result in a different shape of crystal, which absorbs and allows passage to different wavelengths of light. That Saturday Henry and I dug a tunnel through the snowplow pile. The duck became interested in our project — companionably she climbed to the top, beaking around in it for bits of frozen mud. When both of her feet got cold at the same time she sat down in the snow for a while to warm them. Once or twice she levitated, flapping hard. She didn’t much want to walk through the tunnel, and we didn’t make her.

Towards the end of the tunneling I got the camera and took two pictures of Henry looking out, with his hood on and his nose red from cold. Then I was out of film. My pictures used to be better than they are now. About ten years ago I bought a Fuji camera that took fantastic pictures. It was a simple point-and-shoot machine, but the lens was good. Then a few years ago, I was packing our car for a trip. I was holding several things in my left hand — the Fuji by its strap, my battered briefcase, and a shopping bag full of presents — and I was concentrating on my right hand, in which I was holding a suitcase and a coat, but also reaching through the handle of the suitcase to open the back hatch of the car. As I put the things in the car, my overspecialized fingers, forgetting that some of them were doing double duty, relaxed their hold on the camera strap when they released the handle of the shopping bag, so that the camera fell, not in a broken, lurched-after tumble, but straight down, freely released, onto the street. It worked after that for a while, but it rattled in a very un-Japanese sort of way, and finally it stopped focusing. The camera store said they couldn’t repair it, so I bought a new camera, more expensive, waterproof, to replace it, but the pictures it takes are not as good, or else my skill has declined.

These unintentional droppings of held objects have occurred to me at least twenty times in my life. Trouble ensues, for instance, when I have a heavy load from the dry cleaners hanging on coat hangers in a hand that is also holding something else. You can hook a lot of coat hangers onto two fingers, but they pull back the fingers and dig into the skin of the inside fingerjoints, and those heavy coat-hanger sensations are powerful enough to distract from the sensation of whatever other thing those fingers may be responsible for — the mail, say, which falls in the slush. I’m prone to other absentminded acts as well. I once pulled a bag of garbage from the kitchen can, tied it, and hung it on a hook in the hall closet. “Did you just hang up that bag of garbage in the closet?” Claire asked me. “I believe I did,” I said, thinking back. Another time I was standing in a kitchen talking to my mother-in law and drinking a cup of tea. Admiring the teacup, I asked her whether it was Hollerbee china, knowing that she had gone to the Hollerbee outlet with Claire several times and bought things. My mother-in-law said she wasn’t sure where it came from. I turned it over to see if it had the Hollerbee logo on the underside, and it did. But I’d forgotten that there was tea in the cup.