I grew my first beard at 17 or 18. I told people that I did it to look old enough to buy beer, but the truth is, I just wanted to look older. The combination of being a short kid—my “growth spurt” between 7th and 8th grade consisted of going from 4’1” to 4’6½”—and having an extreme babyface meant that I always felt like my outside wasn’t reflecting the maturity I felt on the inside. Not that anyone is actually mature at that age, but it’s the age when you really want people to stop treating you like a “kid.”
By the time I turned 21, I’d been repeating the “it’s just so I can buy beer” line so much that I had managed to convince even myself, so I shaved it off on my 21st birthday: I didn’t need to look older any more, I said, because now I am older. Except ... it really felt wrong somehow. I didn’t really care for the way my face looked in the mirror, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Must be that babyface, I thought. For a few months I tried just a moustache, but that was disastrous. Soon I was back to the full beard.
Now, many people say that, the first time they try to grow a beard, it itches too much. Some give up entirely at this phase; others just perservere and eventually the itching goes away. But I’m a freak of nature, I guess, because my beard never itches when it starts coming in.
But, for some insane reason, once I’ve had it for about 10 years or so, then it starts to itch.
The first time this happened, I suffered for a couple of days, and then I knew that I just had to shave my chin and start over. But I was still scared of the babyface. So I decided to go for a “General Burnside” cut. (This is the fellow for whom “sideburns” are named.)
And this was when I realized: I have no chin. I come by this honest—it’s my mother’s chin. To call it a “weak chin” is being overly generous: in order for a chin to be “weak,” it must first exist, and mine ... doesn’t. Once I had the full sideburns but a clean-shaven chin, I could see it instantly. The beard was defining my jawline, and, without it, I just looked like a complete goober. But it is what it is: every 8 – 15 years, the itching starts, and the shaving must be borne, despite the visual horror it produces. The second time I went with the Burnside again; the third time, I did more of a Ben-Stiller-in-Dodgeball sort of cut. Now we’ve come to the fourth time around, and I’ve done that again (mostly due to lack of imagination); of course, being older now, my facial hair is mostly white, so it’s not nearly as cool as Ben’s was. My youngest child had never even seen my chin before (or at least not that she’d remember), so it came as a bit of a shock. And pretty much all my friends and coworkers have had the experience of being able to say to me, at least once in my lifetime, “oh, hey, you’re right ... you really don’t have a chin.”
So that’s why I look the way I do this week. Luckily, my facial hair—unlike the head hair—grows very fast, so it won’t take long before I’m back to looking like an itinerant hobo riding the rails. Until then, I remain a stubbled, chinless wonder. But not an itchy one.
[Our title comes from an old George Carlin routine that I used to know by heart. If you haven’t heard it, you really should.]