“When I stroke the beard thusly, do I not appear more intellectual?” ~Data from Star Trek Next Generation
I’ve been clean shaven pretty much forever. Dear Old Dad had a muschtache and looked a good deal like Juan Valdez from the coffee comericals. One of my older brothers has a goatee that he has had forever. My boss has one of those neat and trim little goatees that he keeps at a constant quarter of inch length. Whenever I have tried to grow a beard or a goatee or anything, I have been unhappy with how it has looked. That first couple of weeks of growth always made me look like a homeless man in need of a cardboard sign.
But I recently decided to go ahead and grow my own goatee. The style I have chosen is close to the one that William Shatner’s Evil Twin wears in the recent Priceline commericals. My beard is a little longer and a little thicker than everyone else I know. They all have nice polite beards that are kept immaculately trimmed and are never allowed to grow beyond a stage of infancy.
I find myself stroking my beard a lot. A kind of cliched gesture that feels oddly good. Since I have grown the beard I have started to notice other men with beards and what they are doing with them. I saw an older man with a goatee that had about a three foot long bread. There was something sort of orential about this look, though the man himself looked a bit more like Hemingway. I saw another man who had his goatee spread out and appeared to be startched in a pattern remineceant of an appron. Other men have beards that look like Tom Hanks from his Castaway days.
I have had to trim the muscatche portion of my goatee to keep the hair put of my mouth, but I have not trimmed the beard part. I am soon going to reach that point where I need to decide if I am going to keep it this length, or let it grown into a more defining characteristic.
I knew a man who had a huge beard that covered most of his face and went down to about his belt buckle. It gave him a kind of mountain man appearance and worked well with the black cowboy hat he constantly wore. Then one day, for no clear reason, he shaved the beard off. He looked absolutely horrible. Frightening how shriveled and old he looked without that mount of hair in front of him.
I have also started to wear glasses recently and I am gradually going bald. So I think I will soon look like one of those toys where you move metal shavings with a magnet to cover the face. There was an odd toy from my childhood that comes to mind as well. It was call Hugo, as I recall. This toy was a bald manniquin head that came with a number of beards, muscatches, glasses, and wigs. The idea being that you could control how Hugo looked. This was an odd toy, but I remember it pretty clearly.
I had a friend in High School who had this kind of baby face and he also tended to smile a lot. He looked a bit dimwitted as a result. So when he went to college and prosented his adult self to the world, he grew a beard, which he has to this day. I still haven’t decided if it makes him look more mature or just more hairy.
One of my favorite parts of Ken Burns Civil War is all the old photos of soilders and Generals and Colonels and Presidents and Politicans. Everyone had a beard, but none of them were the kind of facial hair that we have in modern times. These beards were all weird and scary and yet appeared to be groomed to look the odd ways they looked. Period pieces never have the right kinds of beards because the audience would break out laughing as soon as they walked on screen. Maybe I’ll revive some really obscure Civil War era beard and learn to stare with an odd intensity. Or maybe not.
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