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Donald Justice wrote a poem that I’ve always liked:
MEN AT FORTY
Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.
At rest on a stair-landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.
And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father’s tie there in secret,
And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something
That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.
Today the issue is the mystery of lather. My Omega 21742 (shown in the photo above) presented a problem in a recent shave: premature lather death. I did a couple of shaves to find the source of the problem. The first investigatory shave showed that the problem was not the boar bristles nor the soap nor the water. A second shave (using the same soap) showed that the problem was not the softness of the knot.
That suggested that the problem is unique to this brush, and since I didn’t recall that it was an issue in the past, I subjected the brush to a good cleaning, following the guidelines in a Sharpologist article.
Today I was careful to load the brush very well, still using the original soap. The first pass lather was fine; the second pass passable; the third pass — well, I had to reload the brush. I fear this brush, much as I once liked it, is destined for the dustbin of history. Perhaps it’s just as well. I purchased a new brush, and my brush shelves are full. Removing the old brush makes way for the new. (Monday will be the big reveal — “big” because the brush is big.)
Despite the unsatisfactory persistence of the lather in the brush, I did get a good shave, using my RazoRock Game Changer .84-P. One thing I really like about RazorRock razors — other than their generally high level of comfort and efficiency — is that their baseplates are clearly stamped with the brand and the specific model of the razor.
And the Game Changers are terrific little razors. Three passes produced a lovely smooth result, and a single drop of Grooming Dept Rejuvenating Serum made a wonderful after shave treatment.
Weekend days are coffee days, and I’m still having Fantastico’s El Salvador Mauricio Salaverria. I bring my own jar and buy a liter at a time, so it lasts a while.