The Beard

By Debbie Carini
When my son was little, he used to sit in the tub and make a beard for himself out of bubble bath.
He’d daub the bubbles around his chin, up his cheeks and across his upper lip, and then smile and shout, “Look at me, I’m Santa!” Or an old man, or a gnome. I couldn’t imagine that the carrot-topped toddler with the soapy grin would grow up to be a young man who would sport ginger-toned facial hair and actually look a lot like the young Kris Kringle in the 1970 stop-motion TV special, “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town.”
Last month, he graduated from the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, and in celebration of that event, 8 of us (2 grandmas, 1 grandpa, 2 cousins, a sister, a mom and a dad) gathered in a rented home on a bay in Gig Harbor.
The grandpa was the first to grumble about the beard: “You need to get rid of that thing. You look like you’ve been stranded in the mountains.”
Then the grandma from Florida chimed in: “Are you going to graduate like that?!”
It’s a funny thing when your little boy is suddenly a bearded man standing before you – you wonder where all the years went.
It’s so easy to remember pushing a tuft of that red hair out of his eyes while he sat on the couch and watched “Barney,” seriously sucking his thumb and breathing into a “blankie” that was so quickly shedding small tufts of lint that you feared his chronic ear infections were going to be found to be the result of a large knot of light green and yellow yarn in his sinus cavity.
Where was the little boy who would only eat food in the color range of beige (he asked for his graduation dinner to be held at a Vietnamese restaurant — his grandfather, who still prefers cuisine on the pallid spectrum was a good sport at the event and even tried a spring roll – “that thing was filled with rubber bands,” he later reported.)? Where was the 10-year old with a buzz cut and missing front teeth whose pants required an inner elastic waist to stay put? And where was the pre-teen in a jacket and tie who self-confidently approached young ladies much taller than him for a dance at cotillion?
In truth, I knew all those iterations of that boy were standing right before me, in the handsome young man taking all the abuse about his ginger-toned facial hair. He is kind and loving, curious about the world, and ready to take on challenges much larger than term papers and final exams. Maybe the beard just made him look too much like a man, and that’s a shocking thing to grandparents. And even to parents. There’s a melancholy to knowing that you will probably never again be shredding the white part of zucchini surreptitiously into a pancake so that a vitamin or two will register in his blood stream. But, by the same token, there is much to look forward to, and, as he accepted his diploma on graduation day, under cloudy northwestern skies, his future looked bright – and, his face, even brighter – the beard was gone. A new man was emerging under the mortarboard and tassel, ready for the next adventure. His smile gave me all the confidence in him I needed. I know he’ll be just fine, clean-shaven or 5-o’clock shadowed, he’s ready to face the world.