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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?”

I just real­ized a few min­utes ago that it’s been three four years plus a day.

(Thanks for the math les­son, Mom.)