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Tales from Exit 22 by Al Batt

 

What the blue blazes am I doing?

I tried to maintain eye contact with shaggy men from outside my zip code who didn’t look like themselves.

Our lives have taken an odd turn down an unfamiliar road. Brilliant scientific minds are working on our problems.

My grandmother was amazed to have electricity. I guess she’d used torches while living in caves. None of my teachers ever thought they’d end up being a security question when resetting passwords. They’d be amazed. We’re less likely to be amazed by things today. We expect things to change quickly. Life is a thrill ride.

Organizations need to be nimble. Virtual meetings have become as common as added pounds during Minnesota’s stay-at-home order. Teleconference and video conference meetings proliferate. They aren’t bad. Everyone gets a comfortable room temperature. Video communications show us that touching a face is a hard habit to cease and there are such things as work pajamas.

I’ve attended a number of meetings on Zoom. I can give it a resounding, “It’s OK.” I apologized for going an entire virtual meeting without once washing my hands. I enjoy not wearing shoes and socks during meetings, and I can do that during online meetings. I like not wearing socks and shoes at all times, but will admit they come in handy while tiptoeing through a raspberry patch.

Women fret about missing visits to hairstylists, but they look great. Some men sport homemade haircuts so short they can’t blink. Men don’t worry about a lack of facial symmetry, because we know we’ll look even worse tomorrow. We miss going to the barbershop to hear jokes and learn what might or might not be. A tonsorial parlor provides presidential press conference-like information without goofy accusations of fake news. We may think someone is a dunderhead, but we keep it to ourselves. It’s the way we were brought up.

Women may look wonderful on the digital screen, but men appear to have gone off the grid, having discontinued shaving in order to have more time to eat cupcakes. A shaded face has been a common look for years. What is that unshaven look called that the 1980s TV series “Miami Vice” first popularized? The scruffy look, the three-day beard, unplowed stubble, my shaver is broken or the results of an unfortunate visit to the Poison Ivy Petting Zoo. I enjoy shortbread, so I call the mini-whiskers short beard.

I looked at my family photo album from back when woolly mammoths roamed the world. Long exposures limited smiles, but smiling just wasn’t a thing done for photographs in the age of black-and-what photos. Faces bearing mustaches, mutton chops, soul patches and beards stared back at me. There were facial brooms reminiscent of ZZ Top, the Smith Brothers, Santa Claus, Grizzly Adams, Abe Lincoln, Uncle Sam, Merlin, Gandalf and Colonel Sanders.

A fellow named Bob, wearing coveralls with the name Ralph stitched on them, walked into the barbershop back when we could still walk into barbershops. He told the barber, “I can’t scape off these whiskers. My face is too wrinkled from years in the sun.”

The barber picked up a little wooden ball from a shelf and said, “Put this between your cheek and gums to tighten your skin.”

After his shave, Bob/Ralph felt his face. We could touch our faces in those days. He said, “That’s the best shave I’ve ever had, but I have a question. What would have happened if I’d accidentally swallowed that ball?”

The barber replied, “Everything comes out in the end. You’d have brought it back in a few days just like everyone else has.”

Beards were as welcome as Christmas decorations put up in May in my boyhood home. Mother told me to drink from the handle side of shared drinking cups when around bearded men. “You don’t know what’s in those beards,” she reasoned.

My whiskers present the beard rainbow — brown, black, gray and white — and give me the look of a crazed hermit who doesn’t own a mirror. My wife is the shave monitor and declares that growing a beard is my worst idea in a long, rich history of bad ideas. I shave before appearing on a digital screen.

We’re trying to get through today and tomorrow. Trying to get to the other side of trouble. On the other side, more whiskers will be shaved, but not all. Baby steps.

You may feel like lint in a snowstorm, but if you and yours are well, you’re being productive.

Remember, everything comes out in the end.

Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday.