Facial Foliage

I’m currently growing a beard. It’s official. I’ve made a conscious decision to grow hair on my face. It’s not as if I have any say in the matter, sure I can shave, but the hair grows regardless of any mental effort to stop. So I’ve decided to stop arguing with my face. You win this time, Beard. It’s been a constant battle since I was about 16. I even like to think of my razor as a tiny sword.

Admittedly, when I was 16, my face was putting up a bit of a pathetic fight. A fight that I wanted to lose. Because every boy at 16 just wants some fur for his top lip. He wants to look more mature, but you can’t really grow anything worth boasting about. If you try to sidle down to the breakfast table, pluck up your collar and ask the family, “Notice anything different about me?” They’ll probably think you forgot to wash your face.

I remember when going to college though, I found out that this wasn’t entirely true. There were exceptions. Boys with all the maturation of a thirty year old, sporting full tramp beards. I used to look at these boys in wonder. They weren’t really boys at all, but Manly idols. How did this happen?

Perhaps young Jimmy was walking to school when he noticed a tear in a hedge. A hedge that had always seemed so ordinary and unnoticeable. But then he remembered what Old Man Jenkins had whispered to him after Jimmy had finished mowing his lawn in exchange for lemonade, “Take the uncertain path…look out for hedges,” and for some reason “crazy golf.” But at this same time, he remembered what his parents had told him on the first day of school, “Stick to the roads…stay away from the hedges,” and when he had asked why, they had looked at each other with a deep sense of knowing, and his father said, “Just because…damnit.”

Now once that something had been forbidden, there was no turning back for young Jimmy, and so through the hedge he went and fell head first into a vat of testosterone. There really is no other explanation.