nothing saps the spirits like a summer cold

The worst part of having facial hair is all the mucus that gets caught in my mustache when I'm sick.

One hairy fellow I met back in 1992 complained that catching food there was the worst part of having a beard. With all due respect to Cookie and his greater number of years of experience with facial hair, I have to disagree. Aside from the slice of watermelon that was stuck there for three weeks after a picnic last summer, I've never once had food caught in my beard.

I wish it were the same for other items as well. But every time I've blown my nose the past three days, there have been not-so-subtle trails left behind, and when I've woken up in the morning, the hairs under my nose have been painfully stiff, like the spears of a tiny army on my upper lip, poised to strike the first enemy they encounter.

All that's stopped me from shaving it all off and being rid of the nuisance is the prospect of having to clean my electric razor afterward.

For the past few days I have been as sick as the proverbial dog. It's not as debilitating as the time I had amoebic dysentery, nor as painful as when I had dengue fever, but in the past three days I've coughed so much that my head feels like a tree that's gone two rounds with a lumberjack. My joints ache, my muscles are sore and even my toenails feel too tight.

Nothing saps the spirits like a summer cold. This one has left me ill-tempered, out of sorts and delirious. I've slept later and for longer hours, and even when I'm not asleep, I just lie around and generally am unproductive. (Once I figure out how all this differs from when I'm healthy, I'll let you know.)

And yet, despite the incongruity, I find that colds actually bring back some nice memories. When I was a child, my mother had a special knack for taking care of us when we were sick. Aside from the usual benefits of being sick - staying home from school, sleeping on the sofa and watching TV all day, and getting out of delivering our paper routes - my mother would say at least once a cold, "You know, you would feel a lot better if you could throw up that big glob of mucus in your stomach."

Something about those words gave them a measure of healing power. Mom would trot out her magic phrase, and in no time the sick person would rush to follow the prescribed treatment, along with anyone else who had been within earshot. To this day, whenever I get sick, I can still hear her saying those magic words.

Natasha of course has extended her wifely sympathies to me the past few days. Earlier today, after I had taken a shower, dressed and changed the baby's diaper, I announced I was going back to bed for a nap.

"What?" she said. "But you just woke up!"

It was less than an hour later that I saw how much she truly cared. The bowl of cereal I ate for breakfast proved to be too solid for my stomach to handle, and I found myself rushing to the bathroom to follow my mother's timeless advice.

I could read Natasha's thoughts like a book. "Poor Dave," she thought. "I can't stand to hear him suffer." And with that she closed the bathroom door and played a Steve Taylor CD as loudly as she could.

Of course, now I seem to be on the mend from my cold, while Natasha is just beginning her turn. Since I've had what she is getting, she has my full sympathies.

But at least she doesn't have a mustache.


Copyright 2000 by David Learn. Used with permission.

The perils and perpetual appeal of ponytails

I've always felt that if a superhero is allowed to do something, I should be allowed to do it too.

Now that I'm 29 years old, some people think I should have put comic books behind me, But who wouldn't get swept up into Mark Waid's coming-of-age story "The Return of Barry Allen," in which Wally West, the Flash, grows out of the shadow of his predecessor? Who could ever forget the psychological problems of Alan Moore's heroes in "Watchmen?" And who wouldn't want a ponytail like Superman had in the mid-1990s?

Back in the 1950s, Superman fought for Truth, Justice and the American Way, all with capital letters and George Reeves' potbelly, and that meant he had his hair cut short like a good Marine. But after Superman died in 1992, the man from Krypton came back in 1993 with long hair. As a means of concealing his secret identity from his arch-enemies, he wore it as a ponytail as Clark Kent.

Ponytails make a statement about their wearers. On a large hairy man who rides a motorcycle and has the word "Ma" tattooed on his bicep, a ponytail says, "Call me a sissy and I'll break every bone in your body."

A ponytail on the head of a business executive, on the other hand, says, "Don't even think of calling me a sissy or I'll get my dad to fire you. He's chairman of the board, you know."

In the case of Clark Kent, the ponytail clearly said, "OK, so I have rippling muscles, disappear whenever there's a crisis and just before Superman appears; and maybe I do survive the most incredible accidents, but I'm obviously just a investigative journalist."

Who wouldn't want a ponytail like that? Heck, forget the ponytail. Just give me super hearing like Superman's, and I'll start getting better stories than Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's Pulitizer-winning coverage of Watergate.

It can be hard to grow a decent ponytail, even without the benefit of Superman's invulnerable hair. (I have an old issue of Action Comics in which Lois breaks a pair of scissors on Clark's mop.) For the past two years, I've been engaged in an on-again/off-again struggle for a tail that gets regularly thwarted just before the moment of triumph.

For me, I have to admit that the appeal in ponytails lies in their "hippiness" and the noncomformist approach they help to project. I don't like to be like everyone else, and one of the ways I can express that is through my hair length.

Ponytails on men have become somewhat acceptable socially since the 60s, but they still convey more than a hint of that nonconformist image. So I've long wanted to grow a ponytail, perhaps for the same reason I've grown a beard.

Back in 1998, I was off to a good start. After nearly eight months without a trip to the barber's, it was getting long enough that even the mayor of Montgomery Township remarked that it was starting to become a decent ponytail.

As luck would have it, that was in May, and Natasha and I had set our wedding date for June 13. If my hair had been another inch or two longer, I could have tied it all back and kept it. But it wasn't, and the progress of eight months was undone by a single trip to the barber's.

The committeewomen, who had hated the tail from day one, cheered. Natasha was indifferent. I was crushed, but I resolved to try again.

Slowly my hair got longer, and inch by painstaking inch, it reached first my collar and then beyond. In front, my hair grew longer and longer, making it hard for me to see when it fell down my face. There was no doubt in my mind. I was going to make it.

Less than a month before my hair would have been long enough to tie the front hairs back into a tail, the managing editor position for the Hillsborough Beacon and The Manville News opened. It meant a raise, more control over a newspaper than I had as a mere reporter, a chauffeured limo and a personal trainer, all at company expense.

Well, I made up the bit about the limo and trainer, but this is a position of some local importance. I tied my hair back one final time, and made the fateful trip to the barber one cold morning.
Snip snip.

That was six months ago, but I've given up. My hair was getting long again, so this week I made a trip down to the Hillsborough Barber Shop, paid my $14 and got it whacked off again.

I just wish I'd get X-ray vision to compensate.