We’ve had a couple of new additions to the Tyner House over the past couple of weeks. No, not a baby or a puppy, at least, not as far as I know. We’ve added a goatee and a set of braces to the family. I got the goatee; the woman who is my wife got the braces, and we’re both happy it worked out in that order. Unlike Wendy, who has been considering getting braces for quite some time, I didn’t set out to grow a goatee.
The truth is, I don’t really see myself as a goatee sort of person. I have always associated goatees as an unfortunate cross between a real beard and a bad mustache favored by aging hipsters and black-clad, beret-wearing baristas with interesting politics and alarming tattoos. My original plan was just to grow a simple mustache. But it takes seven or eight weeks for my mustache to grow in decently, and during that period I hate to be mistaken for an inept or inattentive shaver. So I decided to grow the goatee as a sort of decoy or diversion, hoping that the unsightly stubble on my chin would distract people from noticing the unsightly stubble on my upper lip.
But then, just as I was beginning to think my mustache was far enough along to stand on its own two feet, and I was ready to lose the goatee, something happened to change the course of my facial hair forever: I received a compliment on my goatee from a person of the female persuasion who was neither my wife nor my mother and had no other obvious reason to lie to me. And being a man, and therefore being predisposed to being shallow and easily manipulated by flattering words from a woman, I decided to keep the goatee.
The actual compliment I received, by the way, was that my goatee made me look “distinguished”. I’ve been called a lot of things in my time, but distinguished is not one of them. When you’re a man of a certain age and a woman says you look distinguished, you desperately want to believe it despite ample, if not overwhelming, evidence to the contrary. For the record, the giver of this compliment was considerably closer in age to my mother than to my wife, but a compliment from a woman is a compliment from a woman.
So I’ll keep the goatee for now, at least until the weight of trying to look distinguished becomes unbearable. My sweet and helpful daughter suggested that I would look even more “distinguished” if I paired my goatee with a cool new mullet haircut, but I suspect that her suggestion was more related to providing for her own entertainment than any real concern for her dad’s personal appearance.
Wendy’s braces are only on her lower teeth, and are expected to be there for the next year or so. They’re blue, which is cool because they match both her eyes and blue Jell-o, of which she has eaten a lot lately. Both Adam and Lauren are scheduled to get braces of their own in the coming months, which means that discussions around our dinner table recently have centered around forensic descriptions of tooth extractions and orthodontia accouterments, a sure-fire appetite stimulator if ever there was one.
French essayist Charles Agustin Sainte-Beuve once said that great writing should “enrich the human mind, cause it to advance a step, reveal some eternal passion in the heart where all seemed known and discovered.” Next week, I’ll once again disappoint Mr. Sainte-Beuve when I point out that if John Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono married U2 singer Bono, she’d be Yoko Ono Bono, and if rapper Snoop Doggy Dog married Disney cartoon superstar Winnie the Pooh, he’d be Snoop Doggy Dog Pooh.
Tom Tyner of Bainbridge Island writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper.
