I could easily grow one. I just don't want to.

It all began so positively. I was standing in the elementary school boys' room with my friend Paul. We were in fifth grade, and had just attended a special class about puberty. All of the fifth grade boys had gathered in Mr. Price's class, and the girls had assembled in Mrs. Sonnenfeld's room, to be briefed about what to expect in the coming years; to understand that we weren't alone in experiencing this hormone tsunami.

Paul and I each pressed ourselves against our respective sinks, to enable us to gaze as closely as possible to the area above our upper lips.
"Oh, oh. I see something, " I yelled. My heart pounded. "Come here and look at this."
"You've got three, no four...no, six!" Paul confirmed.
"Six! I've got six mustache hairs. And I'm only eleven. I'm gonna have a Burt Reynolds mustache by next year. Yes!"

That day in 1974 was one of the most exhilarating of my young life. I discovered that I was destined to have facial hair options. I had always considered it extremely cool that my dad could grow mustaches, beards, sideburns and any combination of the three at any time. And now, so could I. All it would take to look like Mark Spitz or Ted Nugent or a motorcycle cop...was a mustache. The options were even more plentiful with a beard. I could resemble Mac Davis, any of the Beatles or a nineteenth century American president. The world was my hairy oyster (hmm...that's gross).

But let me get to the point—things didn't work out.

My first mustache foray occurred because my college girlfriend was infatuated with Magnum P.I., played by Tom Selleck. I decided to give it a shot. Maybe I'll never drive a red Ferrari or be strikingly handsome and fit, I reasoned, but Thomas Magnum and I can be brothers in the 'stache club. I was pretty excited to try it for the first time, but discovered that even after I hadn't shaven for two weeks, I could still identify and name each hair of my "almostache."

I waited another five years, and this time, embarked on a quest for the full Grizzly Adams beard. My wife and I traveled to Europe for a three-month stint; so, hey, what better time to grow a beard and get a perm? That's right, a perm. I had rationalized that, since we were budget traveling and I wouldn't be able to wash my hair every day, a bit of curl might hide the grease build-up.

All of our slides from our 1990 European odyssey show a normal-looking Terri, next to some smarmy dweeb with a grandma permanent and a patchy, swamp grass face mask. My beard looked like the aliens had carved crop circles out of my face to guide them to the oil reserves.

I shaved the beard off before we returned home. I also should have shaved my head.

I still get a wild hair to grow some wild hairs every once in a while.  I'll take a crack at a soul patch or a goatee, but nothing ever pans out. I suppose I'm forever doomed to maintain my membership in the "this is my only choice" society. If only I could shift some of my other body hair around to my face, sort of like a collagen-based Rubix Cube, I could look like one of the guys from ZZ Top.

I'd even settle for Geraldo Rivera.

Airports: such big fun

Since my previous post expounded on our experience at Mickey's Land of the Lost, I've decided to take this opportunity to analyze the "bookends" of any major vacation—air travel.


Airports and airplanes provide their own unique cultures, and to the less-experienced traveler, this strange landscape can prove to be quite stressful and disquieting. The minute I enter any airport, I can almost smell the anxiety. People lean unnaturally forward as they walk, almost willing their upper bodies to reach their destinations at the earliest possible moment. My entire family was guilty of this as we navigated the airport's highways and byways, picking up our pace to a feverish gallop. It wasn't until I gazed behind me and spotted a hazy nine-year-old pulling a pink suitcase in the distance, that I wiped the sweat from my brow and waited for my daughter to catch up.


My perspiration dried to an aspic-like consistency as we waited in the inspection line, and then cooked back up to full viscosity as we piled our earthly belongings, including shoes, into the nasty, gray tubs at the x-ray station. A friendly greeting to the blue-uniformed TSA man was met with cold indifference, and we fumbled to accumulate all of our stuff before getting trampled from behind. We found our gate, sat down and waited to be called, as my sweat again coagulated like a 7-11 burrito which had been nuked, frozen, re-nuked and placed on the counter of a lukewarm kitchen.


Once we boarded the jet, another scramble ensued, as everyone staked out an overhead bin like they were homesteading a new plot of land in the Oregon Territory. The guy in front of me hoisted something extremely awkwardly into the compartment. His face betrayed a crazed grin as he stuffed and slid and pushed his quarry into the plastic receptacle, and if I hadn't examined him more closely, he would've appeared to be shoving a small deer into the compartment (just...one...more...hoof...got it!).


Finally, the melee died down and the plane sailed off smoothly. I always find a sliver of humor in the pilot's voice as he introduces himself to the passengers and details the length of the trip, weather patterns, etc. I understand that he aims to convey calmness and confidence to the more anxious among us, but he usually ends up sounding like the host of All Things Considered or Morning Edition. The pilot's spiel ended, the flight attendants strolled through, handing out the requisite salty snacks, my feet and ankles swelled up like Johnsonville Brats, and we eventually landed without incident.


I won't delve into the details of the return flight, but upon arriving at our home airport, we fell in with several soldiers in the gate area. I watched them, as some studied the departure/arrival board, obviously unfamiliar with the area, and others appeared to know exactly where they were. We walked parallel with one enlisted man, and as we rounded the corner into the main concourse, there stood a five-year-old boy with a huge red, white and blue sign, which simply read, "Welcome home." A woman stood behind the boy, and her face immediately transformed as she recognized her uniformed husband. She burst into tears as three people blended into one elated mass of emotion. I'd seen reunions like this on the TV news, but nothing projects the profound sacrifice these people are making like watching it happen right in front of you. My wife and I immediately teared up, and I almost clapped, but thought better of intruding on their private moment.


At that point, all of the mundane irritations of vacation travel vaporized, and I was just glad to be home.