Floating Animals With My Father

I wrote this post almost a year ago, long before my skirt! friends became my skirt! friends. As I am working on a brand new post for Thursday, I wanted to feature this one more time, as recent events have made me even more aware of how much my family means to me. I hope that you enjoy it.

Pamela

The most beautiful animals I have ever seen will never sit in cages waiting for people with overpriced buckets of stale popcorn to walk by. They do not live at your nearest zoo, complete with animal of the month t-shirts and penguin shaped Popsicles. The stylish design of their coats will never be made into a rug, have bedsheets fashioned like them, or grace the cover of the latest issue of Vogue.They don't posses priceless fur, enviable skins, or brilliantly hued feathers.

The animals of my fondest forest of memories are made of shaving cream. They are simply white. They are not alive.  As a matter of fact, if I were to see them today, with my busy adult eyes, they probably aren't animals at all. But a long time ago, a lifetime even, they lived. They ran, they swam and galloped every morning in my father's bathroom sink.

Let me explain. The man I loved first lived just across the short hallway of our three bedroom house, in the room with my mother. Slow to anger, quick to smile, he built and set a bar so high that it took me until I was nearly 30 years old to find a man tall enough to actually see it.

I do not remember a time when my father did not work. His mornings began before I was aware that I was even alive. The smell of Old Spice and coffee danced together, waltzing room to room until it roused me from my death slumber. It is what I thought every man should strive to one day smell like. Part of me still does. 

 I would wander into his bathroom as graceful as a donkey on stilts, and he would immediately love me with his eyes, which were peeking out of a  fluffy, frothy, by God shaving cream mask. This was no sissy, neon-hued "I wish I were a real shaving cream" cream, but the stuff that requires work from your fingers to encourage it from the can. This process was a methodical and habitual one. It was precise, personal, and purposeful...for him. For me it was more.

For five minutes or 5 hours, depending on who you asked, my father would accompany me on an escape from the tiny bathroom, exchanging linoleum and toothbrushes for an early morning sink safari.

After each stroke of the blade along his face, top to bottom, scraggly to smooth, he would touch the razor into a ready and waiting warm water bath. The shaving cream that had no further purpose on his face or blade suddenly took shape in our tiny pool. "What do you see?" he would ask me. And I, not wanting to answer too soon for fear of a late sprouting trunk, would hold my breath, and wait. Just a minute longer.....

"An elephant, I think! No, anteater. See the tiny ants running for their lives?!" My favorite times were when water and cream agreed, and managed to hold all of our animals together until our safari ended.

I honestly do not remember when our trips ended. I grew up, went to college, fell in love, married, and had two beautiful grandchildren for my childhood safari guide. How lucky they are to know him.