Fuzzy Wuzzy

I think of two people when I think of beards: First, I think of George Carlin. It's hard to think of him without one, since his was a kind of a badge of honor. When I listened to "Class Clown," long before the notion of shaving my own face occurred, I heard this: "That's the thing. The word 'beard' shook a lot of people up. Beard! It's not American sounding. BEARD! Lenin had a BEARD! Gabby Hayes had 'whiskers'. Monty Woolley had whiskers." Whiskers were the things my father would rub against my cheek before he sent me to bed. Hippies wore beards. Hippies like George Carlin.
My dad had a lot of opinions that he seemed to have acquired from a manual on the first day of Dad 101 training. Don't chew gum, it make you look like a cow. Righty tighty, lefty loosey. And people who wear beards are hiding something. I heard these pronouncements as a kid, and they became part of my road map. I still flinch mightily in the presence of gum chewing. Most home improvement projects involve me channeling my father's advice on how to open or close a valve or tighten a screw. And I have never taken growing a beard lightly.
In my late twenties when I had a job moving furniture, I figured that shaving was  a chore I could leave for another time or place, and I grew quite scruffy. I remember telling my father, who never asked, that the thing I was hiding with my beard was my interest in shaving. When I moved to California, I brought my beard with me, and it may have been hiding something, but once my son was born, it had to go. I shaved off my beard and mustache when I saw how his little face squished up when I leaned down to kiss him goodnight.
Imagine my surprise when, after a decade and a half, my son asked me why I didn't grow a beard. It was summer vacation, and having recently shaved my head, my chin was free to be the place where hair sprouted. It wasn't until the fourth or fifth day when those whiskers began to organize themselves into a more recognizable form. I thought about the ads in the back of comic books that offered paste-on facial hair. I thought about the way gray hair made my face look. And I thought about what I might be hiding. For now, I guess I 'm hiding from all that worry about what I might be concealing in the depths of my soul. That and I'm too cheap to run out and buy new razor blades.