My Friend The Beard

Children are usually frightened of me. They gaze at me with awe and trepidation as if I were some newly invented creature they’re not sure they can trust or that I won’t spring at any moment and eat them alive. Because of my beard, I can never say that a kid is cute without looking like closet pedophile.

Even grown adults seem to be scared of me at times. There are have been numerous times riding the bus home that ladies have chosen to stand instead of take the open seat next to me. Women walk faster if I happen to be walking behind them at night through campus. The beard can make me look shifty or homeless.

I like to take naps (everyday) outside - on park benches, under trees, or wherever there is sunshine a soft patch of grass. On one particular day this last summer, I took a nap at the small beach next to the Olympic View Sculpture Park in Seattle. It was one of the best naps of my life - the sky was clear, the sand was warm, the sound of the gentle waves put me calmly to sleep like a lullaby. I woke up from my deep slumber to a fat man in a blue uniform kicking my foot. As can be imagined, I was very disorientated and confused. I opened my eyes slowly.

“Yes, sir. Can I help you?” I asked with my eyes half-closed to block the sun directly overhead.

“Oh,” he said and put his hands in pocket, “sorry. I was just making sure you weren’t dead. Sorry about that. Go ahead and go back to sleep.”

Yep. He wanted to make sure that I was not dead. Would he have kicked a clean-shaven man in Patagonia garb in the foot that was peacefully resting on the beach after a hard day of corporate calls and business lunches? I say with the up most confidence that the answer is no. Apparently, only homeless people with long beards die in parks in the middle of the afternoon.

Now, I would hate to make it sound as though having a beard is nothing but a constant struggle against prejudice and discrimination. Actually, The Beard Life can be a beautiful thing with numerous benefits.

There is, of course, the most obvious benefit: warmth. I have a bristly layer of protection from all of nature’s elements. I don’t feel wind on my face, snow is non-factor, and rain simply beads on my beard like a hi-tech rain jacket.

In certain situations, I get treated with an amount of respect I would not receive with a naked chin. I’m 21 now and there is no greater for a twenty-one-year-old kid and being called “sir” at a restaurant by a man twice my age.

I get to look like a serious thinker. Simply by stroking my beard in a downward motion with my forefinger, middle finger, and thumb, I automatically appear to be pondering one of the great cosmic mysteries, when in truth, I’m most likely just wondering why they ever stopped making Diet Vanilla Coke or why Rocky Balboa ever got made at all.

My beard can also be used for entertainment. My favorite beard-tivity involves placing as many pens and pencils in my beard before one of them falls out. This game can also be played with paper clips, chopsticks, or wadded up Post-it notes.

When I go hiking or camping, I can smell the sweet scent of nature on my upper-lip hair for at least three days afterwards. The rich musk of cigar smoke remains for even longer.

Come Halloween, I have a stock-pile of ready-made costumes growing out of my face. With minimal wardrobe changes I can be any of the major or minor prophets, an eighteenth-century sea captain, a rabbi, a hippie, Walt Whitman, a lumberjack, Russell Crowe from the movie Gladiator, or if I wanted to make things especially easy on myself, a homeless guy.

I can’t say if it is a good or bad thing, but people take a keen interest in my beard. They have a lot of questions and there are some that get asked more than others.

Doesn’t it itch? No. Many men I know don’t try to grow a beard because they cannot stand the itch that enters about two or weeks into the process. They see their potential but then have to shave because of the irritation. What they don’t realize is that once the Mid-Month Itch Stage is over, it never comes back. Yes, that week of irritation may feel like forty years in the desert but the Promised Land is just across the river and it is glorious.

Michael, please, when are you going to shave? My mother is actually the only one who asks this question. She asks, nay pleads, me to shave because she wants to have her little boy back. Or, she at least wants me to look my actual age. But, she does not understand what shaving would mean for me. It would be like killing a puppy you watched grow up, you trained, you got angry at when it pissed on the rug but you loved anyway, and letting it go when it had so much more life to live and joy to bring to the world. But, I guess if we stuck if that analogy I could always resurrect the puppy in a month or so and the puppy would come back thicker and fuller…I digress. The point is, I don’t want to shave and don’t plan doing it anytime soon.