Attachment issues: facing the loss of my facial hair

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/07/2016 (3558 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I am starting to have second thoughts about my beard.

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking: “What? You have a beard?”

Well, if you take an extremely close look at the mugshot accompanying this column you will notice my chin is peppered with what looks like greying peach fuzz.

What I do not possess is the hottest trend in whiskers — the Hipster Beard. Even if you do not follow fashion, you have no doubt seen trendy persons of my gender sporting the hipster beard, which is essentially a long, bushy beard, almost always accompanied by a slicked-back pompadour-style haircut adorning the head of a young person who is invariably wearing a plaid lumberjack-style shirt, even though they have never chopped down a tree in their life.

My fuzzy facial hair falls into the category of the anti-hipster beard. There is nothing remotely hip about my beard. I started growing it in 1978 when I was backpacking through Europe and lacked the necessary motivation to shave or bathe every day.

For too many years, I refused to groom my beard, simply allowing it to grow, weed-like, until it became so long and scraggly that I resembled (a) a serial killer; (b) a member of the Duck Dynasty clan; or (c) the leader of an obscure religious cult based in the Ozarks.

I would ignore the hideous nature of my scruffy beard until my wife couldn’t stand it any longer, at which point I would retreat to the bathroom and attack it with a pair of plastic-handled shears, the end result of which was the sink looked as though a furry woodland creature had crawled into it and exploded.

What with being a crusading newspaper columnist, I have noticed recently beards are generating headlines around the world.

I say this because I have recently stumbled on dozens and dozens of breathless stories reporting the shocking news — brace yourselves for a major surprise — aging Hollywood superstar Harrison Ford has been spotted vacationing with his wife, dropping off a suit, and engaging in other activities while sporting a long, flowing grey beard.

While it does nothing to enhance my relative hipness, I suppose you could say I am attached to my beard. The only time I have been without my beard was about 18 years ago at my brother’s wedding. Egged on by my wife, She Who Must Not Be Named, all the wedding guests thought it would be fun to see what I looked like clean-shaven, so they took turns slathering my face with shaving cream and drunkenly whacking away at it with a disposable razor.

When my wife saw what my naked face looked like, she frowned and grunted: “OK, you can start growing it back now.” Whereas my daughter, who was about six years old, began openly weeping and wailing: “I WANT MY DADDY BACK!”

The point is, things between me and my beard (or is it “my beard and I”) have been fine, but recently there have been signs of trouble. For instance, lately, when I am lying on the couch watching sports highlights on the big-screen TV, our wiener dog will climb up on my chest for the sole purpose of retrieving crumbs of food that have become lodged in my scruffy facial hair.

I could live with that, but things took a darker turn this week while my wife and I were relaxing in the den watching some manner of comedy on Netflix. At one point I turned to her and her eyes grew to the size of dinner plates, and she began laughing so intensely I was afraid she was going to wet the carpet.

I glanced back at the TV to see what was so funny, then turned around again to look at my wife..

“HA HA HA HEE HEE HEE!” she squealed, pointing at my head. “Go look at yourself in the mirror.”

So I did. I noticed there was a long, skunk-like brown stripe running from my mouth to the bottom of my grizzled beard.

I was beyond puzzled, until I poked a finger in the stripe and realized it was, in fact, chocolate. I had been enjoying a late-night snack of toast slathered with Reese’s chocolate-peanut butter spread, which apparently had melted and run down my substandard beard like a tiny delicious river.

It took a good five minutes of intense scrubbing with a damp face cloth to remove all traces of the chocolate stain, all the while listening to the sound of my wife cackling with glee in the den.

So the very next day I visited the woman who has been cutting my hair for more than 20 years and demanded she trim my beard down to the short strokes. I gave serious consideration to cutting it off entirely, but after all these years, I think it’s starting to grow on me.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca