Beard

I'm ambivalent about my beard. I didn't grow it for any particular reason. It's not a playoff beard, although I won't shave it before the Pats win the Super Bowl this Sunday. It's not for warmth, as this has been an unusually warm and snow-free winter. It's not to go undercover, although if my Neighborhood Watch asked to do so, I would in a heartbeat. It's not a spite beard, to annoy anyone.

It's just a beard. During a normal week, I shave two or three times -- I'm a stay-at-home dad, so there's no pressure to be clean shaven. I last shaved the day after Christmas, fully intending to remove my whiskers before New Year's Eve. But I simply didn't, and then figured I'd see how I looked if I let it go for a while.

On January 4th, when I posted a picture of myself and my nascent beard on Facebook, reactions were varied:

"Are you going to grow it really long and let things get stuck in it?"

"Not weird enough." (See video below that addresses my friend Jay's need.)

"If you're growing a beard for winter warmth, you should have started earlier!"

Face-to-face reactions break down along gender lines. From women, I get comments along the lines of, "Oh, you're growing a beard," to "Still got something on your face, huh?" to "When are you gonna shave that ugly beard?" (guess who said that).

Men tend to be complimentary: "Beard's looking good," "Got the beard going, huh? Looks good," "That's the most awesome beard I've ever seen, and I'm 107 years old!"

I hesitated keeping the beard too long, because I have painful memories from my post-college days, when I grew a beard. I was working at my hometown newspaper in the winter of 1987-88 when I decided, for the first time, to get my ZZ Top on. I had no clue about trimming, so the thing got a bit mangy, although thankfully I don't have the genetic makeup to actually grow a long beard. I thought it looked OK, until I saw pictures taken in February '88 at a going-away party my coworkers threw for me before I embarked on a road trip with my friends.

In the pictures, my hair is a bit long, because, you know, it was the '80s and I was young and thought I was cool. And I have tortoise shell spectacles -- what I liked to think of as my Woody Allen glasses. See, you're already getting the idea here about how bad this was.

I'm wearing a pea-green sweater over a brown turtleneck. Yes, you're forming a picture in your head, and it's not pretty (and no, I'm not going to post any of these pictures, primarily because I don't want to scare you, secondarily because my scanner is broken). And under the sweater and turtleneck is something that I can only describe as a big wad of dough. Yes, my stomach, in these photos especially, although less so in reality, looks like I've trapped a baby hippo.

The overall effect of all this -- the unkempt beard, the nerdy glasses, the earth tones, the lumpiness -- is that I, not yet 23 when the pictures were taken, look like a middle-aged professor of geology at a small, out-of-the-mainstream community college. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But not really the image I was going for, or one that I thought I was projecting as I prepared to say goodbye to my friends and family and head out on the Kerouacian path.

Unlike most road trippers, I shaved my beard before I hit the road, and stayed relatively clean cut during my four-month odyssey. Not long after my return back east, I started growing Van Dykes and goatees, rather than full beards. I've stuck with those motifs for the lion's share of the last 20+ years.

But since I can't do much with my hair...OK, I can't do anything with my hair...I figured I'd try a full beard. I've learned a bit about trimming my facial hair over the years, so I've kept the beard much cleaner this time around. I think it looks pretty good, and I seem to have gotten past the itchy stage, so I'm happy.

Still, I won't keep it too long. If I could grow it really long, or at least cultivate enough 'stache to go with a Gay '90s look of some sort, then maybe I'd soldier on.

And now, to make my friend Jay happy, here's Fu Manchu doing "Weird Beard."