You can blame Admiral Zumwalt for ruining my sister’s wedding photographs. And my daughter for turning my face into a lunar landscape.
But now I have no one to blame but myself.
Listen, three beards over the span of 77 years isn’t exactly a lifestyle choice. Especially since the first sprouted by way of serendipity and the second by happenstance.,
But this time I simply looked into a mirror on the most remote island in the South Pacific and abruptly decided that, dammit, it was past time for me to do the Hemingway thing.
Beard the first
Which brings me back to Zumwalt.
He was the youngest admiral ever to serve as Chief of Naval Operations. And he was wildly popular among us enlisted types for his “Z-Grams.”
Z-Grams were a series of Zumwalt directives aimed at lifting morale and such. And the one that caught my attention authorized beards.
Listen, I was maybe 21, and my destroyer was embarked on a Mediterranean cruise – which, following my WesPac excursion the previous year, meant I was on a tour of some of the world’s great exotic (erotic?) ports.
But talk about a callow youth. Up until recently I hardly had to shave at all.
Anyway, along came the Z-Gram and I thought to myself: Myself, I thought, that’s the ticket. A beard’ll make me look like a seasoned, salt-of-the-world sailor.
Except that, when all was said and done, the only place hair would amass on my face was on the bottom of my chinny-chin-chin.
I wanted to look like Bluto, but ended up a pale imitation of Maynard G. Krebs.
Anyway, I didn’t keep it very long.
Just long enough to go on leave, attend my sister’s wedding and infiltrate my little chin hairs in as many of her wedding photos as possible.
No, don’t thank me Sis. It was my pleasure.
Beard the second
OK, I’m just gonna say this: There oughta be a law requiring formal warnings about the perils of parenthood. Otherwise we’re all just sitting ducks in the great gene pool of life.
Jenny was, oh I dunno, maybe six or seven when we joined a father-daughter Indian Guides group. We were the Caribes (after the fierce Caribbean tribe that invented sun tan lotion) and we wore pink T-shirts.
And we camped out. A lot.
BTW, camping with my kids showed me for the first time the difference between boys and girls.
When I went camping with Andrew’s Cub Scouts, the boys would howl, brandish sticks and stones at each other, pee in the campfire and generally demonstrate themselves to be public menaces.
But camping with the IGs was a pleasure. The girls were more or less well behaved, they read and tended to wander hither and yon in single file.
I think we were at Goldhead Branch State Park on the dreaded Night Of The Living Smoke.
All I remember is the girls periodically disappearing into the woods and returning with heaps of, um, kindling, for the fire.
I didn’t know until a day or two later that, among the things being tossed in, were bunches of poison ivy vines. Turns out that when poison ivy burns it wafts around in an oil-like substance called urushiol. And apparently, quite a bit of urushiol ended up coating my face that night.
It was the first time, but certainly not the last, that I wrote one or the other of my children out of the will.
Anyway, the upshot was that I stopped shaving while my face transformed itself from a lunar landscape back into a vaguely skin-like substance. During which time I discovered that, now, hair would not just grow on my chin, but on my cheeks and vaguely under my nose as well.
So I kept my beard for a year or so. I even had a hirsute photo taken for my Sunday columns.
Still, I couldn’t help notice that, for the first time, I was beginning to sprout a sprinkling of white amidst my brown hairs.
I eventually tired of the novelty and shaved.
Heck, I even put Jenny back in the will.
Beard the third
When I was a teenager I dreamed of having grand adventures on remote islands in the South Seas. Like Lee Marvin in “Donovan’s Reef,” or Cary Grant in “Father Goose.”
But mostly my youthful fantasy was to go to sea with Thor Heyerdahl, my favorite Pacific explorer what with Capt. Cook being dead and all. Preferably on Thor’s balsa wood raft.
That didn’t happen. But in March I finally fulfilled my lifelong dream of traveling to Easter Island (Rapa Nui), the most remote populated island in the world.
It was a splendid journey well chronicled in my blogs. I fancied myself an American expat in a sweat-stained Bogart suit with a parrot that could pull the cork out a my bottle of wine.
What I did not imagine was shaving for the week I was there amidst the giant stone heads. So I didn’t.
And here we are going into May and I gotta admit that it’s, um, growing on me. Literally.
Oh, and I even have a sprinkling of brown amidst all that white, thank you very much.
Ernie and Bluto would be so proud. Maynard would be green with envy. My daughter would no doubt roll her eyes and ask me if she’s still in the will.
Course, now I have to cancel my Harry’s subscription.
FreeGNV 