Having noticed the auspicious anniversary, I was thinking a bit about Dad. I thought I’d told this story already, but I couldn’t find it in a search of my site. Maybe it was just in my eulogy.
For most of my life, Dad had a beard. If you dig out the really old SRCI yearbooks, you can find photos of him clean-shaven. I think he grew the beard in about 1980 or so, and he must have liked the way it looked because he kept it for a long, long time.
He told me once that his plan was to win the lottery, do all the necessary publicity, cash the cheque, then shave his beard off and become invisibly rich.
It was a solid plan, too. If you saw a photo of him pre-beard next to one of him with the beard, you might be hard-pressed to say the two photos were the same person. JJ : Beard :: Superman : glasses.
Then one year, when he was working up in Lac Brochet, he and Mom came out of the north for the summer and… he was clean-shaven.
The first thing I asked him, when I saw him, was, “Is there something I should know?”