Musings on the Beard I'll Never Know

My wife won't let me have a beard.

All I can get away with is a trimmed mustache/ goatee combination. But what I really want is a beard. Dynamic, moveable, thick, gray, brown, blonde with a smattering of red.

A calico of depth and dimension.

Unfortunately, the pattern of growth that my facial hair follows isn't exactly ideal. It grows all the way down my neck leaving a need to shave and shape the superfluous growth - the sort of metro-grooming that I hate to do. As did Walt Whitman:

My beard-line travels from the sideburns directly across the plane of my face to the mustache region passing just below the cheekbone. Were it allowed to grow wild - no shaping or modifications - the uncontrollable growth would resemble some 19th century revolutionary or text-book communist.

A Viking Berserker or a Gold Coast pirate. Strategically braided or even beaded. The potential to warp the fabric of space and time. The power of the ancients. Primal. Tribal. Timeless.  FREE!.

(Primate. Monkeyman. Sasquatch. Yeti.

Baskets of fruits and honey. The bark of the Yuba. Full-moon magic and the silky midnight.)

Someone once asked me while discussing Henry David Thoreau: How can you trust any man with a neck-beard?

How can you not?

If anything, these times call for such reckless disregard foe the opinions of others!

I could manifest a full mountain-man beard that billows in the wind as proudly as any banner. 

But my wife won't let me have a beard. My single friends might imply that this is an example of my gelding.

That is why they are single. And why I am beardless. 

Oh, Paul - were I capable of such amazing growth, my wife would demand it!  

But, alas. I bear the burden of Jim Morrison's Ewok pattern - which can only demand intervention:

"He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man." - William Shakespeare

Thanks, Bill.