My present hairiness is monumental, and I intend to carry it into the grave. (I must avoid chemotherapy.) A woman has instigated each beard, the original bush requested by my first wife Kirby. Why did she want it? Maybe she was tired of the same old face. Or maybe she thought a beard would be raffish; I did. In the fifties, no one wore beards. In Eisenhower’s day, as in the time of the Founding Fathers, all chins were smooth, and during the Civil War beards were as common as sepsis. Both my New Hampshire great-grandfathers wore facial hair, the Copperhead who fought in the war and the sheep farmer too old for combat. By the time I was sentient, in the 1930s, only my eccentric cousin Freeman was bearded, and even he shaved once in summer. Every September he endured a fortnight of scratchiness. Many men, after trying a beard for five or six days, want to claw off their skin. They pick up their Gillettes. Despite the itch, I persisted until I looked something like a Mathew Brady photograph, or at least not like a professor of English literature at the University of Michigan.
