Some people actually liked my beard
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- April 30, 2018
- 1653
I used to mark the beginning of spring seeing the first robin. That rite of passage had its roots in my Midwestern upbringing and the cycle of seasons that held sway until I was in my mid-40s (when coastal Carolina became home).
Now nearly 18 full years down that road, I’m not as rigid in my delineation. Robins, I’ve observed, are year-round residents so that makes them as ubiquitous as palm trees and Spanish moss, which know no season.
And that’s required a bit of a reset. How do I assign aviary phenomenon to a time-tested harbinger?
It’s not easy, nor is it something obvious. For example, last weekend I was sitting in my lawn chair on the patio, just listening to the wind as it whispered through the loblolly pines that border the back yard. Nothing much was on my mind.
I’d finished the work week. My fantasy baseball teams, of which I have seven, were doing well as a group, though Apple Corps was slow getting out of the gate. I saw a burgers-and-bratwurst cookout in the near future. And best of all my wife was extremely pleased that I’d taken time — finally in her opinion — to shave off the winter scruff that had been adorning my face since Halloween.
That also had been a tradition. In a nod to the baseball season, I would begin raising a beard at the close of the World Series and would shave it off when pitchers and catchers reported to spring training. There was something comforting, for me at least, in that ritual. Plus — and this is something that went virtually unsaid between my wife and me — I really enjoyed the freedom of being relatively lazy for four months out of the year.
Shaving, if you’ll pardon the pun, can be a real drag, and I reveled in the tonsorial bliss of ignoring that biweekly chore over the holidays through the dead of winter, all the way up until my birthday at the end of February. And there was, despite my wife’s annual protestations, an upside to my capitulation to sloth.
Some people actually liked my beard, besides me I mean.
Faithful readers might recall how in the Bicentennial Summer, owing to a mishap involving red paint at my job as an employee of my town’s parks department, I ended up wearing a gallon of the stuff on my head. It was a nasty, nasty thing to have to get most of my shoulder-length hair cut off by my best friend’s sister, who performed the sad task nimbly, ably and expertly.
Me? I thought of it more as a back-alley abortion and just couldn’t get used to seeing my reflection in the mirror, staring back with a shorter version of my seventh-grade haircut. So I decided to compensate by stopping shaving.
My mother, as you can imagine, was anything but pleased at this decision, but it was after all, my face.
“But you’ll shave before you go back to Notre Dame,” she said, not asking but telling.
I ignored her. My first afternoon back on campus I ran into my old girlfriend as I walked across the South Quad on my way to the bookstore. She did a double-take and then squealed in delight.
“Dewey!” she cried, rubbing her hands over my skull and scruff. “You look just like Pete Townshend!”
I kept my Who-like appearance until the end of baseball season and then shaved for the winter. Since then, however, it’s been a reverse twist, and it’s always worked for me. And as I’ve mentioned, my wife looks forward to my re-emergence as the real me with anticipatory relish. Which is why, this spring, I sprang it on her as a surprise.
A note to all husbands out there: Always be looking for ways to become a better you. Sounds simple, but it often isn’t.
Later that evening as I sat on the patio and watched the coals glow as the burgers and brats marinated, I saw what I believed to be a butterfly flitting toward me. Upon closer inspection, however, it turned out to be a hummingbird. I was utterly mesmerized.
With its Gumby-green feathers and ruby-slippered thorax, it hovered, Tinkerbell-like wings fluttering a hundred times a minute. But by the time I’d roused myself from my reverie and had run inside to notify my wife of the rare sighting, the hummingbird had vanished in the blink of an eye.
During the first spring of our relocation, she had set her heart on sighting as many new species — to us at least — of Southern birds as possible. She bought a special field guide, armed herself with her father’s hand-me-down binoculars and began to record each and every sighting.
Later that April she invested in a specially made hummingbird feeder, one that she filled with some kind of sweet and sticky viscous red liquid guaranteed to lure those wonders of nature to our back yard. And it worked, but there’s always a down side. Fire ants also found the elixir intoxicating and soon took over the spot like an outlaw biker gang. So it had been a decade or more since I’d seen a hummingbird back there.
A few days later I was relaxing back there, and what should land near the grill but a seagull. That was a first.
Living a few miles from the beach has its seasonal charms after all.
Mike Dewey can be reached at CarolinamikeD@aol.com or at 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. He invites you to join the fun on his Facebook page.