Measlier Shaven
Peter the Great thought beards were anti-European. He outlawed them. Ayn Rand thought beards were masks for psychological problems. She condemned them. But the beard of my uncle poured love into the soul of every beard-hater. There was mystery in the beard, but honesty, too. It made him a man of ideas, but also a man of the earth. (“Terrorist,” said some among us, but that was the lazy man’s way of saying the same thing.) The beard revealed contradiction in him, but also timelessness and universality, and I always believed that if there was any one man who could seduce angels, it was him.
Then he shaved his beard. Samson spun in his grave. Armies of angels withdrew from the earth. And when my uncle walked into a house party last night, women huddled over margaritas turned pale and whispered their new agonies to each other. The men were relieved of envy, but even envious men were hurt to know that a remarkable thing of beauty had been erased. Just what stale thought had convinced him to slice the poetry from his face and send it down a two-inch hole in some sink in Northridge, Calif.?
Some blamed the wife. Others blamed the man himself. A preacher forecast the end times. There were at least two judges in the room, and at least a dozen lawyers, but there was nothing anybody could do to bring the beard back.
Only time can do that. And until it does, I will refuse to talk to my uncle, or to call him by his name. I have rearranged its letters, and I have found that they settle into a suitable anagram: “Measlier Shaven.”
