Week Twenty-Six: February 22nd

"Daddy, why are you smearing Vaseline on your beard?"

And so began my week-long adventure wearing "I Am The Walrus." Though I did not spend hours each morning slathering the tusks with petroleum jelly, I had no need to: beard hair is so coarse, the slime wanted no part of letting go of my beard for the next few days.

Though normally apt to play with my beard or stroke my facial hair, this week's entry may have cured me of both habits. I don't know that I realized I had this habit, until a few years ago one of my students turned to me as I was listening to him read and said, "Will you please stop that?" Of course, that only made me more likely to do it during subsequent visits, just to irk him in my own amusing little way. He got to the point that he would just glance and glare at me in mid-sentence and I would laugh, stopping briefly.

Of course, I did not have walrus tusks back in those days. Past shaving accidents even left me with one tusk longer than the other, in true walrus fashion. Male walruses (or walri, as some call them) battle for ice-floe and shoreline supremacy. Using tusks and girth, they will shove and grunt and try to carve their opponents to bloody sausage in the manner of elephant seals. Of course, walrus males have hardly the tenacity of elephant seals. Theirs is more like a Sunday couch-potato nacho bowl battle by comparison.

My current students, so used to the leaf-rake-sounding beard-stroking that they don't even hear it anymore, did not even notice the tusks. On Friday, someone touched my face, causing me to say,"You know, not everyone likes to have his face touched; and I am one of those people." This brought attention to my face for the first time, prompting another student to ask if they were wings. When I told him they were walrus tusks, that touched off a clamor that took several moments to quell.

At the end of the day, one other boy asked me if I was trying to grow a different beard each week over these past few weeks. I snorted and replied that I have grown a new beard for each of the first 26 weeks of school! Everyone gathered around and gaped. Could this be possible? They are beginning to learn that I enjoy making many things possible. Strange things included.