Archive
10/23/08 - (2)
First Manicure
What possessed me, ten days ago, Pressed, as I've been, with my eighty-hour workweeks, To make today's appointment with a manicurist, At the salon where I get my monthly haircut, Rest assured, I didn't have even an inkling, then.
And yet, not five minutes into my new grooming experience, With a complete stranger clipping my nails, Cutting and kneading my cuticles, massaging my fingers, palms, Applying soothing emollients, balms, to my hands, Something I'd not anticipated cast me back to my past,
When, as an eight-, nine-, ten-year-old, I'd accompany my dad to the downtown tonsorial parlor In the gleaming marble-and-mirror-festooned basement Of the prestigious Mayfair Hotel, on St. Charles Street, Where he'd go to maintain his professional appearance
(He an entrepreneur who wore Oxford and Hickey Freeman suits, Silk ties, Hathaway shirts, Johnston & Murphy wingtips), Allowing himself time, out of his eighty-hour workweek, Once a month, to get a haircut, from Walter Hohenbaum, While having one of the manicurists do his nails.
Those were the days right after the Japanese surrendered, On the deck of the USS Missouri, The firebombing of Dresden, Berlin — Nazi Germany — When America's economic opportunities were emerging From the greatly depressed thirties, early forties, And the red-white-and-blue flag of FDR's stewardship Was flying higher than Benjamin Franklin's kite and key, Signaling, to a population distrustful of government, That things would be OK, all right, again, Once the New Deal had time to take full effect.
And that's how I vaguely remember all of it, That heady aftermath of the wars with Germany and Japan, When the United States caught its collective breath, As the Cadillac factory in Detroit, Michigan, Quit assembling tanks, started making cars again,
And my dad, having prospered, manufacturing military uniforms (His office just three blocks west of the Mayfair), Emerged, in the early fifties, as an owner of the American Dream, Allowing his five kids to live a life, if not of leisure, Of privileges he'd not had, for having no choice but to work.
Tonight, with my father six years into his final rest, I stare at my freshly cleaned and trimmed nails, And the eight-, nine-, ten-year-old child I was, Who loved tagging along with his dad, has now told me Why I went, today, for the first time in my life, for a manicure.
10/23/08 - (2)
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