the look

What My Father Gave Me

Father’s Day is a reminder of the traits and rituals that we pass down, often unwittingly, through DNA and demonstration.

The image can feel inescapable this time of year: a man glancing at his reflection, running his hand over his newly smooth skin. Sometimes, a boy will be watching him, his face gazing up, his eyes wide with admiration and anticipation of the day he too will learn how to run the blade down his chin without making a cut.

The things fathers pass on to their sons extend far beyond the dominion of the Y chromosome. Many of them are obvious: the physical features, the personality traits and the skills and talents so often attributed to DNA.

Then there are the less obvious inheritances, the links that later seem inevitable. The choices that, upon further examination, seem like they were shaped by some tenuous bond to the past.

And, of course, there are the practical lessons.

Shaving is often presented as a masculine rite of passage, an inherited ritual passed from father to son. Never is that association sold more aggressively than in June. Razors and brushes are featured in Father’s Day gift guides and arranged in store displays — neat little pyramids, stacked next to foams and creams and balms, all those male grooming products lined up in orderly rows.

Maybe these presents are a way of saying thank you: for the everyday instruction, for the nudge toward adulthood, for just being there. I wouldn’t know.

I was 4 years old, a good decade away from growing hair on my face, when my father died of leukemia. He was 36. In my memories of him, which are scant, hazy and impressionistic, I can’t recall ever watching him shave.

Though he must have. In the composite image I have assembled — a collage I’ve pieced together from vague recollections and dozens if not hundreds of old photographs — his face is clean. I assume he, like many men, learned to shave from his father, my grandfather, whose manual razor and can of Barbasol I often remember seeing at his bathroom sink before he too died, about 20 years after his son.

The first time I shaved, I cut myself with an electric razor.

It was my sophomore year of high school, and the peach fuzz on my upper lip had gone from being a point of pride to a source of irritation: sparse but increasingly dark and patchy. I’d also apparently reached whatever stage of puberty causes scraggly hairs to sprout like underbrush at the back of a young man’s neck.

In the middle of an already awkward adolescence, one marked by resilient pimples and even more resilient pudginess, the smattering of hair made my face look even more … inelegant.

The resolve to tackle this errant hair problem hadn’t really been mine. My mother, likely prompted by concern that her teenage son was heading toward Gandalf territory, announced one Saturday that it was time for a shave.

I didn’t own a razor at this point and had never touched a can of shaving cream. So we marched from my bedroom to her bathroom, where she picked up my stepfather’s forest green Remington rotary shaver and handed it to me.

“I think you just turn it on,” she said, as I positioned myself in front of the mirror, “and then press it against your face.”

I stared at her a bit blankly, then we both looked down at the razor. Everything about shaving was alien to me; the rituals, the implements and even the necessity. And she, a woman in her 40s, was on similar ground.

“Are you sure?” I flipped the device over to look at the small clipper on the back, with its jagged metal teeth. “Maybe you use this thing?”

She glanced at it and offered a small shrug. And so I, not knowing better, turned the razor on, flipped the trimmer out and brought it to my chin. With a heavy stroke, I brought the clipper across my skin, like it was a lawn mower and my face was an unkempt yard.

The scratch it left was the first hint that I’d missed something.

These kinds of mundane mishaps weren’t the things we talked about when we talked about my dad. For years, the stories I was told of my father weren’t quotidian; they were exceptional.

I’d hear about how he would con his way into floor seats at Madison Square Garden after charming Knicks players’ wives; people would tell me about his remarkable culinary prowess or how he was often the smartest person in a given room. My friends’ fathers were present but seemed ordinary in comparison. Mine was absent but felt mythic.

Now that I live in my father’s city, he is everywhere. I wander the streets of his old neighborhood, my steps tracing paths he and my mother forged decades ago. I work for the newspaper that he grew up reading — the one that published his wedding announcement and printed the crossword puzzles his mother loved. Our lives are a kind of Venn diagram that crosses time, and I delight in the overlap.

My New York apartment is four blocks away from the one that was once his. I walk by his old address on the morning when, spurred by a yearning for traditional masculinity, I decide to attempt a manual shave for the first time.

I don’t really think about the location until long after I’ve exited the drugstore with a multiblade razor and a bottle of shaving gel. By then, I’m home, and an uneasiness settles over me as I empty the contents of a plastic Duane Reade bag onto my counter.

I turn on the shower and close the bathroom door. I want the steam to soften my stubble and open my pores. It doesn’t have to be painful.

While I wait for the water to heat up, I stare at my reflection in the mirror; in a bathroom as small as mine, there’s really nowhere else to look. I search my face, as I so often do, for traces of my father as I re-enact a ritual he once performed at a sink just like this in an apartment nearby.

Our shared resemblance that day strikes me in a way that it rarely has. I run the fingers of one hand across my chin, tracing the sharp jaw that’s both mine and his. The other hand goes to the curly, untamed mess of hair on my head. Everyone tells me that came from him, too.

I stare at my eyes, my nose, my ears, and then I close my eyes, trying to conjure an image of my father’s face at the age at which it is frozen forever. For some reason, I’m fixated on his smile. It’s symmetrical in a way mine isn’t. His grin is wide in a way mine never was but maybe, someday, could be.

Andre Wagner is a New York City street photographer. Michael Gold is a social media editor for The New York Times.