Mid-January

"Your beard is ridiculous!" That was what one of the women with whom I work said to me a few days ago; and so we open the season in which everyone feels free to comment on the growth of my facial hair. Bring it on!


What I have always found curious, in that suppressed-Sociologist kind of way, is how so many of these people are ones I rarely see and even more infrequently have the opportunity to talk to. People I barely know will from henceforth feel it is well-within their rights as beard-nation citizens to comment and question the look and flow of my beard.


At least that will happen if this goatee adventure follows the path of last year's ridiculous beard. In the second half of that beard's journey, random strangers approached me more often than known-ones (as opposed to loved-ones, who always felt free to offer more than two cents on the situation.) Don't get me wrong, I do not mind the comments at all. At least it gives people something else to discuss besides their jobs and the weather. As a champion of anti-small-talk, that is all I could ask for.


Here is another view:

Note the smooth flow off to the right-hand side, a la early-80s Christy McNichols' feathered hairdo. It's OK to be jealous. Maybe I'll get this thing permed....

Beginning of January

The beauty of living away from relatives is that they are never prepared for any changes in your physical appearance, particularly when those changes involve facial hair. So, while my brother shaved the mammoth beard he had grown for nearly 15 months, I emerged onto the family bearding scene with this hair-rag attached to my chin. Of course, it never fails that the beard is at its most ragged when you head home for some event.

My brother and I already have a tradition of arriving for Christmas with some kind of sculpted or manicured facial hair, the last two years of unkempt hair contagion notwithstanding. I made even sure I was otherwise well-shorn, practically burning my face with razor marks in the significantly-cooler and drier New Hampshire climes. Such are the sacrifices one makes in the name of superior beard-dom.

Now that we are nearly to the halfway point of this drooping chin travesty, I think it will be better to do bi-weekly updates. Not that it changes all that much within each month, but the longer it gets the more people feel compelled to comment, and I feel that has only just begun. So, let us all ring in the new year with a beard still in its adolescence!

Mid-December

Lots of Goat-Haters out there....

I will be the first to admit that I appear to be incapable of growing facial hair at an even rate, whether throughout the beard or on certain sides of my face. Once again it seems as though the right side of my beard is growing at a more rapid rate than the left or center. Not only that, but the right side is growing in thicker...thus the natural sweep to the right you see in the photo above. Like the necessity for alignment of car tires that are suddenly pulling to one side or another it would seem that I need some creative trimming to even out this situation. That is counterproductive, not to mention against the spirit of this whole affair, so it is not happening!

Of course, many people like to point this out, more so the adults around my school than the kids, who have already begun to regret the challenge they posed to me a few short months ago. Now that the beard has entered its middle-ground shaggy phase, the kids have to deal with the untamed hairs reaching in every direction on any given day, and in no particularly predictable fashion. The adults in our school feel it necessary to comment on this, while the kids are giving me cringing looks that tell me I should shave...and do it SOON!

Meanwhile, on the home front, my older daughter enjoys keeping track of the growth and revels in running commentary about how this iteration of the beard/goat is coming in with a lot more white. She has taken to calling me Whitebeard from time to time. That is hardly necessary, though it is apparent that this girl has inherited her father's occasionally biting and always quick tongue. Our younger daughter just vacillates between her desire to see the "Big Beard" return and the need to see me clean shaven.

These are the grueling middle months of beard growth that no one glamorizes. They are the necessary meat in the sandwich of facial hair odysseys--some days you get bologna and others salami--you just have to power through and hope to shake the stink.

Mid-November

It's one thing for growth to happen at irregular rates. I, for one, was a slow-grower. Though I experienced frequent physical growing pains in my legs as a lad, I rarely saw an physical pay-off in the experiences. I actually entered high school just over five feet tall and would eventually skyrocket, in incremental doses, over the next five years, to the towering height of 5'8". Even within my elementary school building, peopled as it is with ladies and children, I am still not a tower of physical stature by any means. In fact, most of the ladies with whom I work are of equal or greater height and the kids who have passed through the school, and especially through my classroom, love to return and marvel at how much taller than me they have grown. Trust me, this is not difficult. Our poor daughters have been shackled by the physical limitations placed on them by my vertically-challenged genes, just as I was held back by my own mother's limited height: she was all of five feet, one-and-a-half inches, and you had better believe that extra half inch was always important!

Even growing up, I had moments when the growth rates of my body did not follow any kind pf symmetrical plan. Aside from my cranium, which by all accounts has always been massive (the genetic gift of my father, the only size 8 fitted hat I have met in person), my limbs did not often cooperate: through high school, college, and into early "professional" life, one of my legs was at least half an inch shorter than the other, causing numerous back issues and the perpetual orthotic insertion of a foam pad my doctor and mother incessantly called a "shoe-cookie," for years, perhaps hastening its entrance into its subterranean landfill domain.

I would love to imagine that this asymmetrical growth does not extend to my hair but that would simply not be true. Last year, during the eight-month beard adventure, I struggled with the truth that the right side of my face grew hair quicker than the left side. I hoped it was simply a matter of accidental trimming while paring the facial garden but as you can see from the photo above (straight-on shot) that habit persists into the Year of the Goat. I am half-determined to leave it alone, combing it under to hide this strange growth-pattern, but why not be proud of it and leave it for all the world to see? After all, it was our Parent-Teacher Conferences this past week and they got to enjoy this phase of the growth, when no amount of manicure and mane-tending can tame the wild growth of the fourth month. Goat ON!

Mid-October

I am getting to this one a little late, but these pictures were actually taken close to mid-October. One must preserve the integrity of the goat journey after all. I am nearing the point at which I will have to shave, or at least thin the moustache portion of this evolving chin-creature. The razor hairs that spike down into my upper lip and grab at the food passing my lips into my mouth have never struck my fancy. Plus, if I were someone who is married to someone whose face was covered in upper-lip hair, this would be the part I would abhor most of all. You simply cannot avoid those gripper-hairs on the upper lip when your face is close to, or actually in contact with, someone else's face and that someone happens to have a moustache. Unless you are Tom Selleck and have the manliest 'stache going, or you lived n the time of Wyatt Earp, or you are Rollie Fingers or Goose Gossage and you just don't give a damn, you must think of your spouse. In case you are wondering, I have not been smooching any gentlemen callers and have never had the misfortune of rubbing noses with any mustachioed men, but I can imagine it would not feel nice, and I have to consider how my wife feels about the entire thing.

That is, after all, the question I have received most often over the past three years, from the themed-beards of Year One, through the massive facial mane of Year Two and now, in Year Three, the the ever-lengthening goat: "What does your wife think of that?" Anyone who has ever read this--so, all six of you--probably already knows the answer: she likes it. I am asked the question in equal proportion from men and ladies; the men always asking with forlorn admiration in the way that so many men think the wifely grass is greener on my side of the fence (hell, I think it is too, but, as my wife is spoken for BY ME, you gentlemen are out of luck!) The men are always amazed when I tell them she likes it, and they usually follow-up by informing me about the beard stranglehold their wives have on them...clean faces only!

The ladies who ask me reveal their feelings about the beard at the same time. Their question is slightly different: "How does you wife feel about your beard?" but their faces when they ask it tell the story well enough. Few have ever asked me without concurrently crinkling their noses or sneering slightly through pursed lips as though to affirm two things I could have already told them: (1) They think it is disgusting and they never would have allowed me to grow one in their house; (2) The reason I would never have been married any of them. Suffice it to say I am a very fortunate man, and not just because my wife does not mind my beard experimentation.

Mid-September

Maybe it has something to do with gravity and the aging process...or maybe it is because these frequently-abused chin follicles have given up any forms of resistance they may have previously proffered. Or maybe it is something else...some unexplained mystery of the goat-growing universe that has allowed this goat to begin its journey on such a strong foot, or chin.

Whatever the cause, even I was a bit surprised by the change in the chin from the first check-in to the second. When our girls were babies we took weekly photos of them with a sign letting viewers know which week of their life it was. But we also took a monthly photo as they reached that milestone. We were always amazed to look at the changes in the month-to-month photos that we had not noticed in the week-to-week photos. How could we not have seen these major changes in their bodies until we reviewed the monthly photos? These two goats are like that.

Many things change over a month. Our school year is now a month old and the kids who stormed the scene on opening day are already quite a bit different from the ones who now sit and work in our classroom. So, for the record, YES, I am comparing my goatee growth to the physical changes in our two daughters in their first years of life and the character changes among the students in my classroom since the beginning of school. Let's keep these things in perspective, here! Step back and view the changes from afar. We never notice we are older until we are, many years later...so why would it be any different with chin hair?

Goat Check: A New Beginning

Well intrepid facial hair explorers and loyal follower(s) I must admit that I thought my mid-July trim of the monstrosity that was attached to my face would be the end of our remotely-accessed time together. How could I know the level of inquisition the beard's departure would cause? Who could have predicted the outcry over such a little--OK, LARGE--thing? Or, the absence of a large thing, rather.

People who had grown so accustomed to the beard suddenly whisked past me without a second glance. But almost all of them followed with a standard double-take-and-turn to ask if it was really me. Many people thought I lost massive amounts of weight or had undergone some sort of medical procedure.

Well, they were correct on one count: I have lost weight (over 20 pounds since January, 2011) and quite a bit more from my face. These people did not know what to make of this sudden change. At least the change was sudden for them. They did not own my face...but when you undertake a process such as this, your face become public property and bystanders make suggestions they deem worthy of overruling your desires by eminent domain.

There are very few people I will listen to when it comes to the growth of my facial hair; the brief run at Beard Democracy last year notwithstanding. One such group to whom I will acquiesce are my students, particularly when they take an active interest. I once thought of opening the Beard Democracy up to them, in a teach-them-voting-and-public-governance kind of way. I decided against it, perhaps wisely.

But this year, on opening day of school, August 16, 2011, my students sat with me for our first read-aloud (9:04 AM) and inquired as to the whereabouts of my facial hair. I had but a short-trimmed goatee at the time, and no plans to do much more than tinker with designs and sink back into general disregard for my facial hair except maybe around Conference and Open House time.

There they were asking me about the beard in one breath and challenging me to grow a new one in the next. As tempted as I was, I doubted I would do the same thing two years in a row. After all, I am not even teaching the same grade as last year, having moved up from Second to Third this year. (I have only four of the same students so you could say there are 17 new victims, er, students.)

It was precisely one of these students--a vociferous eight year old, if ever there was one--who dropped the challenge to me on opening day. How could I not like this girl instantly? Coming in with little knowledge of me and my ways and wasting all of seven minutes before issuing what may yet become this year's quest:

...to grow a goatee the entire school year.

So, here I am, on my way to doing just that. I don't know if I will succeed or just get sick of the whole affair by mid-year and hack away with scissors and nail-clippers one desperate day in the future at my desk, but we'll see how far this thing goes. Check back for the progress of this wayward goat, and maybe you'll see what happens.