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The other day I was driving home from nearby Seabrook, New Hampshire. I’d gone there to take advantage of the Granite State’s much lower prices on beer and wine — necessities during these crazy times of global pandemic — and on the drive home along U.S. Route 1, I found myself longing for my parents’ thoughts.

Returning from Seabrook, as I slalomed around Route 1’s car-eating potholes and beneath overpasses with rusty rebar visible through holes in the concrete, I remembered being a kid and riding around with my father all over New England. He’d grown up before Eisenhower’s interstate-highway initiative and told us about how Route 1 was a paved thread that ran all the way from Florida to Maine, that such a connection was an important, amazing creation. Nowadays, Route 1 is little more than Main Street in many towns, full of momentum-sapping speed limits and stoplights, while the interstates entirely bypass society just a couple of miles away.

Weaving along Route 1, my father’s history lessons returned once again to the front of my mind. As I’ve mentioned in this space before, my folks were born in the 1920s and grew up during the Great Depression. They and their families survived those horrible times, and I found myself wondering how they would react to the hoarding of toilet paper and having to self-quarantine and all the other horror stories we’ve been hearing about of late. Though both my mother and father had come about as far as one could from their early days of privation, to the point of living very upper-middle-class lives, I suspect they would still have some deep-seeded memories and methods for surviving this 21st century version. And I suspect they’d have lessons to offer that would be helpful.

These thoughts of who and what has come before me, and who and what has contributed to who and what I am, are always there, of course, not just when I’m slamming into potholes on Route 1.

Every day I see books in the shelves about Camp Shanks, the Army embarkation camp just outside of New York City where my father shipped out to his combat duty in World War II. After the war’s end, the area became his and a lot of other families’ home, and yet, what’s left? A small museum in the old elementary school, and a couple of books on a bookshelf. Such an important, pivotal place, full of collective knowledge particularly valuable in these days, and it’s little more a suburb of strip malls surrounding a couple of off-ramps on the Palisades Interstate Parkway. What insights those people who settled the post-war landscape of what is now Orangetown, New York, could offer us in these times. Sadly, all those insights are, as Roy Batty lamented in Blade Runner, “lost, like tears in rain.”

Dad with Marie at a party once upon a time.

We lost another generational thread recently with the passing of Marie, a neighbor and the mother of some dear friends. Marie and her husband, Joe, who passed some years ago, were close friends with my parents, and Marie was the last of the quartet. I wasn’t able to see her in her final days for fear of bringing along this damned virus, if I had/have it, but had I been able to, I would have cherished the opportunity to ask Marie about her thoughts on stockpiling and rationing and making do.

This loss of generational experience and knowledge is visible in the various generations’ reactions to this pandemic. Oldtimers hunker down for safety’s sake while careless millennials whine about having their spring breaks cut short. And Gen X just kinda cruises between the two. Personally, as the offspring of parents who had kids late, I find myself caught in between all of the warring generations.

My birth year (1966) places me among Gen X, the age group whose nonchalance honed by growing up tending to and entertaining ourselves has supposedly made us perfectly suited to the current challenge of social distancing.

And yet, as the son of a man and a woman who grew up in the Depression, I am experientially, if not chronologically, a Baby Boomer, having heard first-hand tales that would be so useful today. Because I didn’t live those tales, that knowledge remains sadly out of reach. And that’s what I miss right now. That’s what I believe our entire society misses right now.

Dad never lost his fascination with an innovation like Route 1, I guess because he’d seen so much over the course of the 20th century. And now, separated from the rest of society, even this curmudgeonly hermit is left to wonder just what we gained, and lost, in Eisenhower’s bargain. Sure, I love being able to get from here to, say, Annapolis in eight hours on I-95, but sometimes I wonder about driving Route 1 the whole way and spending the several days it would take to really see the America that exists behind the sound walls lining the freeways.

Roy Batty spoke for us all.

Face Follicle Fun

“There’s never a moment when you can’t change your life.” I read that in some self-help book or blog at some point and it stuck with me. I mean: it’s true. We really CAN change our life any damned time we please. Just…do something different.

And so it is with my wearing of facial hair. (What? You thought this was going to be some kind of serious post?! C’mon! This is ME we’re talkin’ about!) Each winter I wake up one morning and think, “Ahh, to hell with it. I ain’t shaving. Think I’ll grow my beard again.” And so I do. In about a week I reach the point where my face doesn’t look like I simply haven’t washed, and in about a month it’s a full-on beard. In recent years I’ve chosen to keep my beard fairly well-trimmed, not at all like I did when I was living the ski-bum lifestyle when my then-girlfriend got angry and told me, “You look like a homeless person!”

I grew a beard most winters when I lived in Utah, Montana, Idaho and Alaska, but it didn’t really fit when I lived in San Diego. Just too damned warm and sunny all the time. (I know: oh, the burden of SoCal weather!) And I’ve done it since I’ve been back here in New England, it’s just that in recent years the damned thing is a heck of a lot grayer than it used to be. And while the gray doesn’t bother me in and of itself, it sure isn’t conducive to an active social life.

But this year, I just haven’t really cared — about the gray or about my social life. Or about a whole lot else, to be honest. It’s been a messed-up winter, and letting my facial hair grow out was less a style statement than an act of laziness.

My messed-up winter actually began in late autumn. While stretching out before hockey one evening — something I’ve always been vigilant about — I felt a little twinge in my groin muscle. No big deal; happens a lot in hockey where the skating motion requires all of your leg muscles to work hard. I kept stretching as I continued to skate over the coming weeks and the niggling muscle strain never went away. And then, one day in early December, I lunged for a loose puck and felt the muscle completely let go. The next morning, swinging my legs out of bed, I could feel the ache in my groin, my hip and my abs.

So I shut everything down in December: no skating, no surfing, nothing. I tried one yoga class thinking it might help but that was futile. Attempts to stretch even a little made my whole core ache. And little things — swinging out of bed, using my knee to hold the steering wheel while driving — hurt from my leg to my abdominal area. Something was NOT right, so much so that I started going to dark places in my head and, man, that’s never a good thing.

You’re saying: “why didn’t you go see a doctor, you dummy?!” Well, being self- or unemployed depending on the week, my insurance is through the state and, well, it sucks. My research suggested I had a sports hernia and surgery wasn’t an option financially so what was the point in paying a ton of money to hear some doctor tell me, “Rest it and give it time.” I could do that myself…which I did, just in time for the holiday eating and drinking to add quite a few pounds to my belly. Awesome!

I resumed skating in January, using a tight wrap on my upper leg and popping ibuprofen after each session. And the thing was, I actually felt better AFTER skating, most days. It’d still twinge a bit now and then, but nothing too bad. I’ve resumed surfing and am slowly adding body-weight exercises to my regimen. I don’t hurt getting out of bed anymore and I did, finally, see a doctor who told me not to go to those dark places in my head anymore, that it was just a muscular injury.

I’ve broken multiple bones, I’ve had knee surgery, I’ve had more stitches than I can count, but this injury has been, without question, the worst physical ailment of my life. For three-plus months I was reminded every single day by my body that I was not 100 percent. And it was going to be a while before I got back to 100 percent. It infringed on every aspect of my life and it sucked.

On top of all this physical BS was the gloom of the dark New England winter, the despair-inducing experience that is looking for a job in your 50s and the whole dealing-with-the-house bullshit that arose back in the fall. So letting my beard grow out was just a physical manifestation of the “why the f*$% not?!” mindset into which I’d fallen.

But as that self-help person pointed out, EVERY SINGLE MOMENT we can change things for the better. And that moment finally arose for me.

I started with getting back on the ice and back in the water. And now I’m continuing the process with the decision to go clean-shaven once again. In reality, it’s not THAT grandiose a notion.

The flip side of that morning when I decide to grow a beard arrives in late winter when I wake up and think, “Ahh, to hell with it. Think I’ll shave.” That day was today and…voila!

[ngg src=”galleries” ids=”10″ display=”basic_thumbnail”]And as I’ve done when I’ve shaved off my beard in years past, I figured I’d have some fun along the way…which is what I’ve chronicled here. Hope you get as big a kick out of the various looks as I did. And one of these years, I swear I’m gonna do the Amish/Brigham Young thing of the beard-along-the-jawline look. That’d be HAWT, don’tcha think?!

Oh, and you can take to the bank the following two things: One, as soon as I finished, I looked in the mirror and thought, “Damn, I think I like me better with the beard.” And two, it WILL get cold and snowy sometime in the next few days.