Minutiae

A challenge to the bloggers that I respect and read every day. You know who you are. Pick something very mundane in your life, the least detail of your day and write something about it. Please send me a link or an email and let me see your work. I love being mired in the minutiae of daily life.

Here's mine...

The water is warm as it rolls down my face. I clench my eyes closed as I rinse the last of the soap off. I take an extra minute or so just to bask in the warmth and feel the water on my chest and face.

I dab two fingers across the bar of soap from each hand and rub it across my cheeks and under my chin and across my throat. Rinsing the soap off of my fingers for a few seconds, I can open my eyes enough now to see my razor on the little plastic shelf that the bride bought last year and put in the shower. It also has her shampoo and some kind of special soap in a covered dish that I’m not allowed to use. I’ve never even peeked inside to see what it looks like.

My razor is one of those dark gray or black jobs that you can push the little button and it ejects the razor part from the handle, hopefully into a trash can and then you push it into the slot on a replacement one that comes in a little clear plastic tray-like thing with several others in it. I usually do that ever couple of weeks when it feels like I’m pulling the hairs off of my throat instead of cutting them. I don't know what brand it is which sometimes causes a problem when I go to buy replacements. I normally look at the pictures and pick the one that looks most like mine when I'm at the store.

I swipe the head of the razor across the bar of soap and start to draw it up my throat, starting under my right ear and working my way steadily across until I finish under my left ear. Then, I rinse the razor under the running shower water, give it another wipe across the bar of soap and start up the right cheek, taking short strokes until I feel the resistance give way all the way up to my sideburns. I take a few short strokes across the cheek and as I approach my beard and mustache, I take three fingers from my left hand and reach across taking the right edge of my mustache and beard and pulling them over a little to the left. I use these fingers to guide the razor in cutting just along this line, leaving a neatly trimmed goatee.

Another rinse and I switch hands with the razor, repeating the process on the other side, but this time I start with the fingers holding the whiskers and shave over from the beard to my ear. I take my right index finger and run it up and down the cheeks, across the bottom of my chin and turn it over using the back of the finger to feel along my throat on both sides. If I feel a little stubble anywhere, I give it a touchup with the razor.

Repeat the check until completely smooth, you know like a baby’s bottom and replace the razor on the shelf. Then I put my face back into the shower spray and feel the warmth for another minute or so while I bask in the glory of it and rinse all the soap off of my face again.

It may take an extra minute or two to shave without a mirror, but it's so much more comfortable to do in in the shower. I never get razor burn that way. Besides, I've gotten good enough at it over the years that I'm pretty fast.

Stay tuned, next week: shampoo