Self Reflection

When I was a freshman in high school I was cast in the role of the Rabbi in our production of Fiddler on the Roof. Every night before the performance I had to sit with a makeup artist (a gorgeous senior girl) who used spirit gum to painstakingly glue a long beard to my cheeks and painted my face with a stipple sponge and makeup pencil to give me an aged appearance. "I love your lines" she said to me one evening, "Not your lines in the play, but the lines of your face. They are so great; they give you a lot of expression, and the make it easy to do your makeup." Whether it was at that point, or sometime later that I decided I would simply accept my looks as I aged, I don't truly know, although I think it certainly influenced me.

My facial lines stayed much the same as I aged - perhaps gaining a bit more depth. But I had a harder go of it with my hair, which started to noticeably thin in my early thirties, something I didn't really like that. Still, I decided, there was no real arguing with genetics, and while my mother's father's nickname had been "Whitey" because of his white hair, he had been bald for the 18 years of my life he was alive. So if going bald was inevitable, I thought, I'm just going to look how I look - no comb-overs, no Rogain. Didn't Captain Picard look amazing with his bald head? And I'd been told I had a good head, so I decided when the lack of hair from my forehead back met my balding pate, it was all coming off!

When I finally did shave all my hair off, it wasn't long before I grew the fringe out around the sides, although this was more at my wife's insistance than my own desire, she herself invoking Patrick Stewart's short fringe cut. Ah well; she has to look at me more then I do, I suppose. Will I ever find myself as handsome as I believe Patrick Stewart to be? And yes, I've seen him in person, without makeup. I was surprised to find we're the same height!

Will I even care less what anyone else thinks of how I look - my wife included - than I do about how I believe I look? I wonder. Myself, looking at my reflection, there are times I think, "Who is that?", others when I see my father who admittedly still had much more hair when he died at age 87 than did his 55-year-old son, or some combination of my father and my maternal grandfather. There are still other times, though sadly less common, when I think "Well, hello you sly devil, you!" and wink at myself in the mirror.

Is it not enough
To revel in beauty
Even if I am
The only one to see it?
Why must I often wonder why
I find something beautiful,
And having no answer wonder
if it truly is?

Never truly having felt
Particulary handsome,
I once asked a woman
Whom I percieved as
Particularly stunning what it felt like
To be beautiful.
Her response? "I don't know.
I guess I always just feel like me."
This brought me up short.

The Bible tells us
Mortals look on the outward appearance
But the Lord looks on the heart.
Looking at my own heart
I can some days see the light,
But more often see the darkness,
The scars left by my choices
And the words I have ingested.

My mother once said to me: "You
Have thoughts about your thoughts
And feelings about your feelings."
Is this genius? Or depression?
Some mix of both? Or neither?
No matter. I confess, I envy her
The simplicity of
Unquestioning belief.

— Zachary