Only one time since the summer of 1982 have I not had some sort of facial hair.  I started growing a beard that summer while walking beans.

 

Wait!  I just saw several of you tilt your heads!  "Walking beans" is what kids in the midwest used to do for a job before Roundup soybeans were created.  It's just like it sounds.  We'd walk thru rows of soybeans in the field, looking for weeds to either cut or pull so they wouldn't find their way into the combine head during harvest.  This process would also improve the looks of the fields so the farmers could have something to crow about at the local coffee houses.  We'd start walking late June or early July and walk until early August.  By then the beans were too tall and tangled to walk thru.  In the late 70's and early 80's, we were paid $3.50/hour and the farmers I worked for brought Pepsi, Ding Dongs, Twinkies, and the best chocolate chip cookies ever for our break time at 10am.  I was fortunate enough to work with my best friends, so it wasn't even like work (though sopping-wet jeans and 5 lbs of mud on your shoes from dew-soaked beans were a drag).  But I digress (I do that a lot!)…

 

My mom didn't like my beard, but she understood that I was starting to spread my wings a little bit after high school graduation, so she permitted it "under her roof".  By the time I started my first year at Illinois, she said she actually preferred it.

 

You see, I have no chin.  And a beard is the perfect thing to mask this deficiency.  When I was younger, its red hairs matched the hair on top of my head pretty well.  That is until they started abandoning me or turning gray.  Now the beard's mostly red features (yes, the gray has invaded there, too) and there's a starck contrast between it and the reddish brown gray that is above my ears.  But I still prefer the beard - if not for the chin then for the time I save not shaving each morning.  Prudence will always prefer me with a beard.  Her first roommate in college was a spooky girl who told her she'd end up marrying a guy with a red beard - 2 years before I showed up!  Scary!  The kids have never seen me without one, so I'm not sure what their reactions would be.  My guess is that they'd walk right by me in a mall without realizing who I was.

 

I mentioned that I've been without a beard only once since 1982.  That was in 1986 in the last semester of my senior year of college.  I was interviewing with a number of big name companies that visited the college placement office weekly.  I had good grades in college, but the competion in my department for these jobs was fairly strong.  Anything you could do to gain an advantage was being done.  After about 6-7 interviews that didn't pan out, I asked Prudence for some advice.  She had graduated 2 years earlier and was working for a recruiting firm in the Chicago area.  Back in the clean cut, 3 piece suit and tie days, she was instructed to avoid placing guys with any facial hair.  So I took her advice and shaved off the beard and mustache for a big inteview with a trading company from downtown Chicago.  This company had all the perks I was looking for, plus they served breakfast and lunch!  I could just envision myself living downtown, walking the streets of Chi-town with briefcase in hand, on my way to a 56th story office overlooking Lake Michigan, ordering an omlet at my desk, and coding programs that would trade billions of dollars of commodities each day.  How cool would that be?  Well, I show up for the interview early, looking the best I could.  After about 10 minutes, a man emerges from the meeting room.  He's wearing a beard.  He's reviewing the profile card that each of us had to fill out for the placement office.  On the card is a passport-type photo of me, WITH MY BEARD.  The guy looks at me, asks me my name and then says, "Your picture shows you with a beard.  I hope you didn't shave it off for the interview."  If you really know me, situations like this fluster me to no end.  So I go into the inteview with my head screwed on wrong and completely bomb.  When I got back to my apartment, I called Prudence and gave her an earful.  We laugh about it now, but at the time, I was hot!

 

Since then, when I get the urge to shave, I just shave off the sides and leave a gotee.  I did it this weekend as the temps climbed into the 80s.  Normally I don't think much about what I look like, but now that I've been blogging for a while, I began to think about the image from my profile.  Without a beard, I'd be a clone of George Costanza.  Many people have photoshopped me into various "George" poses.  Probably the "best" one is my head on George's body as he poses in boxer briefs while  stretching out on a couch.  *GROAN*  But as I was shaving this time, a different image popped into my mind and I didn't like where it was heading.  The image was Burl Ives!  I could see myself shifting from the Seinfeld character to "Big Daddy" from "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof".  Worse yet, how soon would I become Sam the Snowman from "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer"?  Does anyone else see this?  I am so in need of an image makeover...