When I reached adolescence and began needing to shave, my father gave me his old Remington electric shaver. I never liked using it. I didn’t like that I had to depend on a machine every morning, I didn’t like the noise it made, and I didn’t like the slightly sandpapery way my face felt after I used it. Eventually, I asked my father to show me how to shave with a razor.

“Why?” he asked. “It’s so much easier with the electric one.” That seemed an odd thing for him to say, since he shaved with a razor every morning. I think he just didn’t want the responsibility of teaching me, because he was known to cut his face occasionally. But he gave in and showed me how to use a razor and shaving cream. From then on I shaved the old-fashioned way, and, not surprisingly, cut my face occasionally.

It never occurred to me to grow a beard until I was in college, when I met my friend — later to be my roommate — Krishna. He had a beard, and told me that had grown it as soon as he was physically able to, because he had a pudgy baby face and wanted to look more mature. “Besides,” he said, “I don’t want to live in a culture that requires you to put a blade to your throat every morning.” (Krishna was the kind of guy who could make pseudo-profound statements like that and sound cool doing it.) Still, I resisted the temptation to grow one of my own. Where I was raised, in the conservative suburbs of Long Island, people didn’t have beards. Besides, I was performing regularly with the mime company I’d founded, and I’d never known of a mime who had facial hair.

The barrier finally broke the summer after my junior year. My girlfriend had left the country for the summer, I was living alone on campus, and I was dramatically in mourning. I moped around, wore dark glasses, and stopped shaving. When I finally re-entered the world and took off the dark glasses, I discovered that I had a beard, and it actually looked pretty good. I also found that I had no desire to resume putting a blade to my throat every morning.

When I went home to visit my parents, they were not impressed. “You’re going to shave that off, right?” my mother said. “You don’t want to look like that when they take your graduation picture. You’re going to have that picture for the rest of your life.”

“You know who you look like?” scowled one of my parents’ friends at the synagogue. “You look like Jesus Christ!” Clearly he had never studied art history, because my beard looked nothing like Jesus’s. Not to mention that my hair was shorter.

I did, in fact, keep the beard, and despite my mother’s warning, it appears in my graduation photo. I went clean-shaven a few years later because of some acting roles, and by chance I met Debra, who was to become my wife, during that beardless period. When she went away on a planned trip to China, I took the opportunity to grow my beard back. I promised her that when she returned, if she didn’t like how I looked when she returned, I’d shave it off again. Fortunately, she did, and I didn’t.

Over the succeeding years, as I gradually lost the hair on top of my head, I was happy still to have hair at the bottom of it. My beard turned fully gray just about the time I began my teaching career, transforming me into the perfect model of a college professor.

A musician I know, who sports a similarly gray beard and a shaved head, once suggested that I start shaving my own head. “You’d rock that look,” he said. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when it became clear that haircuts would not be available for a while, I took him up on the suggestion. Although I had long ago abandoned putting a blade to my throat, I was now regularly putting a blade to my scalp, and not surprisingly, cutting myself in the process.

“Why don’t you try an electric shaver?” asked our goddaughter Shaelyn.

“No way,” I said, and told her about my experience with my father’s Remington. “It’s noisy, and it just wouldn’t shave close enough.”

“You know,” she said diplomatically, “it’s possible that shaving technology has improved in the past 50 years.”

She had a point. (I hate when that happens.) I did some research, and found something called the Skull Shaver Pitbull, which has four pivoting rotary blades and is expressly designed for shaving heads. I bought one, and now I’ll never turn back.

Krishna died a few months ago, but not before he had a chance — via Zoom — to admire my new look. I think of him every time I stroke my beard.