Nows and Forevers

I’m starting the year with a beard, or at least the makings of one.

I stopped shaving my face almost two weeks ago, while in New York for the first time in years. I had planned to be cleanshaven for my visit to my daughter’s grave and especially my mother’s and grandparents’ graves. It made sense to me, because my mother wouldn’t want me to be unshaven.

I haven’t fully shaved since. I had a razor but no cream, and I used water to clean off the sides of my face. I kept a goatee, for lack of a better term.

I have a checkered past with beards.

The first one was in my senior year in high school, where I let my hair grow a little long and I stopped shaving. I imagined myself as some kind of artsy hipster, the kind you might see 20 years later in Brooklyn. In reality, I probably looked a lot like what I was, a teenager crying out for attention. And trying to get the girls to notice me.

Anyway, it lasted for a month or so. My parents, bless their hearts, turned the other cheek. They probably knew it was just a phase, and that eventually I would be back to my ruddy, cleanshaven complexion.

Which I did, right after the girl who was my friend who I had a secret crush on, told me she liked me better without the beard.

It was gone just about the minute I got home. And I got a haircut soon after.

That was my last longhaired look. I’ve got what Frieda in the Peanuts would call “naturally curly hair,” so ever since I was in high school, I’ve kept my hair short in an effort to keep it under control.

But a beard, that’s another story.

Well, I should clarify. Haven’t ever spent more than a couple of months with a beard. I think a little over 2 months is my record. Maybe a little bit more. But that’s happened on a number of occasions, usually around my birthday, in early October, whenever the Red Sox have gotten into the playoffs. So that’s 1988, 1990, 1995, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, and 2013. I didn’t have a playoff beard for 2018.

I know it’s stupid but I felt that it was a great way to honor my hometown team. I would stop shaving when the regular season was over, sometimes sooner than that, and then shave it off soon after they got eliminated. Between 1988 and 2000, that wasn’t long at all. (It helped that my significant other at those times hated facial hair and wouldn’t go near me.) It lasted a little longer in 2003 and still longer in 2004. My former wife, who was loving and graceful in all things, loved me equally clean shaven or scruffy.

In 2004 I kept the beard into November because the Red Sox won the World Series that year for the first time in 86 years. I couldn’t believe it, and maybe a little bit of me thought that somehow the time-space continuum would be upset and the World Series invalidated if I shaved.

Eventually, though, I did shave.

And that’s the case in the other times that I’ve had the beard. Gone as soon as the Red Sox were done.

It’s not even a beard for long. I preferred some type of goatee, which accentuated my red hair. That’s what I have now.

I don’t know how long I’m going to have it, either. This time it’s not tied to baseball but instead symbolic of my return to New York, which has meant so much to me in my life. I went there last week and I resolved, for reasons that still elude me, to not shave for a while. Will it be until I get back? I do not know.

My former wife, Melissa, and I were fans of “The West Wing,” and she used to love to watch “thirtysomething.” She told me that my beard, along with my red hair, reminded her of Timothy Busfield, who was in both shows. I had hoped that she would remember Busfield as ace reporter Danny Concannon and not Busfield as Elliott in “thirtysomething.”

“Of course I think of you as Danny,” she said. “I was more of a Ken Olin fan in ‘thirtysomething.’”

She always knew what to say.

I’m thinking of her as I grow this beard, even though she’s no longer alive. No one ever appreciated me for me, in all my good and bad, than she did.