Selfies
The beard came back for a couple of weeks. The look, intentionally lost two years ago, set aside to remind, with each look in the mirror, of a new direction. Even those who cultivate their looks the least still cultivate a bit. So I find it OK to say that it came back looking gray and posed for me as too old, too soon. I decided to let it go again and trade the waft of fuzz for the daily scrape of razor.
Before I shaved it on down, I meant to take a selfie that day, maybe at the park in the golden light. But I forgot until that night, so shot in the near dark at band practice. The band, by the way, was sounding great. But a wise man once told me… “It’s not how you SOUND, it’s how you LOOK.”
The Indigenous Fish 
One shaves his whole face, and looks as much like a great masculine woman as it is possible for him to look. Another leaves his moustache, and another a goatee. One cultivates a pair of delicate whiskers, while another makes them broad and strong as the back of Hercules. One curves them gracefully round this way, and another in that, while a third presents them square and hard, or pointed and piquant. Indeed, there is no end to the diversity which our five hundred millions of men manage to create with so simple a thing as a human beard. ~Anonymous, The Ladies’ Repository, “Editor’s Table: Beards,” September 1862
Your beard never stops growing. It never gives up on you, so never give up on your beard. ~Author Unknown
February 8, 2015 at 3:17 pm