I was a little guy, maybe four years old, planted in the bathroom doorway watching Grandpa shave. Ma and I lived with him and Grandma until I was five, and that doorway was my front-row seat. The shaving cream went on thick. The razor went to work. Then came the Old Spice aftershave, and the whole bathroom smelled like a man getting ready to meet the world. After that, he got dressed: slacks, shoes, a buttoned, collared shirt, tie and jacket, with the fedora on his way out the door and his pipe never far away. Grandpa was born in 1914, and he dressed the way the men of his generation dressed. I had no idea I was taking notes.

Today, when I dress for business, I wear slacks, a collared shirt, a tie, a jacket and a fedora. I tie my tie the way Grandpa taught me. And every so often, when I’m settling the knot in the mirror, I catch sight of my hands and I see his..

What I remember most about those mornings is watching. A boy in a doorway sees everything.

Psychologist Albert Bandura proved it. In his famous Bobo doll experiments at Stanford University, which began in 1961, children who watched an adult attack an inflatable doll later copied that aggression themselves, even though no one rewarded or punished them for it. The study involved seventy-two children between the ages of three and six, the same age I was in that doorway. Bandura’s work became the foundation of social learning theory, and one finding stuck with me: boys copied the behavior of male models more than female ones.

Bandura studied aggression. The same wiring works for dignity. A boy who watches a man treat his appearance with care files that away as “this is what a man does.” A boy who watches a man let himself go files that away too.

I filed away the shaving cream, the aftershave, the knot, the hat and the pipe. Forty-plus years later, they all show up in my mirror.

Here’s a fun bit of history. The Shulton Company introduced Old Spice for men in 1938, and its earliest men’s products were mostly shaving soap and aftershave lotion. Grandpa was a young man in his twenties then. Decades later, Old Spice launched “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” one of the most successful ad campaigns in modern marketing. Grandpa had them beat by about seventy years. He never needed a shirtless guy on a horse. He just needed a sink, a mirror and a little boy watching.

Old Spice is a fragrance I’ve always remembered vividly, and science has an explanation for that. Rachel Herz, a cognitive neuroscientist at Brown University, has spent her career studying smell and memory. In one study, she compared memories triggered by just reading a word, smelling an item, hearing it or seeing it. The memories brought back by smell were more emotional and evocative than the ones brought back by sight, sound or words. You can look it up: “A naturalistic analysis of autobiographical memories triggered by olfactory, visual and auditory stimuli,” published in Chemical Senses in 2004. Herz explained it simply: with a scent, people get an intense emotional feeling that’s really visceral.

That’s the doorway. One whiff, and I’m four years old again.

There’s one memory of Grandpa I carry with me every single day, because it’s attached to my body.

My hands look like his. The shape of my thumb, the way it rests against the rest of my hand. The light tufts of hair on my knuckles. The veins standing up across the backs. I’ll be reaching for a coffee cup or straightening a tie, and there they are: Grandpa’s hands, doing what Grandpa’s hands used to do.

Those same hands taught me how to tie a tie. Now mine tie it every morning.

Grandpa came up in Harlem in the 1920s and ’30s, the same Harlem and the same era that shaped James Baldwin. He used to tell me stories about our family when I was a boy, and those stories told me who I was. His hands told me the rest. When I look down at mine, I feel like he’s right there with me. I never have to wonder whether I carry him. I can see it.

Brother, take a look at your own hands. Whose are they? What did the man you watched teach you, for better or for worse? Some of us inherited a knot and a fedora. Some of us inherited a slammed door or an empty chair. Both kinds of lessons got filed away while we stood in the doorway.

Divorce has a way of knocking the mornings out first. The shave slides to every few days. The shirt comes off the floor instead of the hanger. The tie stays on the rack because, really, who’s looking?

Somebody’s always looking. And you need those mornings more than ever.

Researchers Michael Norton and Francesca Gino at Harvard Business School tested how rituals help people through loss in a paper titled “Rituals Alleviate Grieving for Loved Ones, Lovers, and Lotteries,” published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. People who reflected on past rituals or completed new ones after a loss reported lower levels of grief. The reason was control. Rituals restored a sense of control, and that eased the grief, even for people who didn’t believe rituals would work. And here’s the part I love: most of the rituals people described were personal and private, and very few were religious or communal.

Personal and private. A man at a sink with shaving cream on his face. A man at a mirror working a knot into place. When the rest of your life feels like it’s coming apart, you can still control the next fifteen minutes. That’s a ritual, and it’s a place to start rebuilding.

When my daughters see me in a suit, tie and fedora, I can see the pride in their eyes. Grandpa’s legacy lives on in a way he probably never imagined when a little boy in pajamas was staring at him from the doorway.

Your kids are in a doorway right now. Maybe it’s a literal one, on your weekend with them. Maybe it’s a video call, a ballgame or a car ride. They’re watching how you carry yourself through the hardest season of your life. They won’t remember most of what you tell them. They’ll remember what they saw.

Grandpa never knew that a four-year-old in the doorway was building a man out of everything he saw. He just got up every morning, shaved, splashed on his Old Spice, knotted his tie, set his fedora and went out to meet the world with his head up. Decades later, his grandson does the same thing with the same hands.

The doorway never closes, brother. Somebody’s always standing in it. Make sure what they see is worth carrying for the next fifty years.

Your move. Who’s standing in your doorway?