When I was in grade school sometimes we’d fool around with words – who didn’t – and exchanged the first letter of our last name with the first letter of our first name – making me Hary Morton.  Talk about a glimpse into the future.  Middle aged women, riddle me this: what the HELL is with the facial hair that grows as fast as those time-lapse  movies where the blade of grass grows from nothing to seven inches in three seconds?  My bathroom cabinet is filled with various and sundry remedies: Sally Hansen chemical depilatory, NADS, beeswax both hot and cool formula, little gadgets with essentially sandpaper on them (hair just glides away, yeah right) and of course the glue-ey strips that supposedly rip the hair of your face, not to mention some kind of bleachy product for the upper lip peach fuzz for in between torturous hair removal sessions.

The chemical cream is the easiest and works well and I’ve learned the hard way that it is best to set a timer  –  I think I’ve already related the story of my grand entrance at my 30th college reunion that included a “beard” and “mustache” not of hair but of red, scaly skin resulting from forgetting I had the stuff on my face while I packed.  So much for not being caught dead with facial hair when I met my party buddies.  I ‘fessed up, everyone had a good laugh, no harm done.

It was time again the other night. Chemical cream.  Five minutes.  Done.  However, it is important to get out the magnifying mirror because without fail, there they are – the Spartans of the facial hair universe.  They are long, they are strong, they resist the cream. They resist all the above mentioned products.  Not only that, because they have apparently now been stripped of anything that might be considered texture, they refuse to be grabbed by a tweezer.  I always prevail, but WTF?  Why do those hairs grow so much faster than the others?  One day they are not there (I check often, obsessively) , the next day I’ve got an entire United Nations Plaza of freak flags flying proud on my face.

The magnifying mirror also reveals their opposite – tiny fine hairs just above and at the corners of the lips that make me appear as if I descended from a walrus.  A big ol’ hair is ultimately painless to remove once you get ahold of it.  Not the baby hairs, that as a group seem to suck themselves back into the skin when you try to grab them.  Once you succeed at that task, ripping those little suckers out as a group is exponentially more painful than one lone hair.

Every four – six weeks, I succumb to cultural norms of beauty and cut the grass on my face, and use an edge clipper on my eyebrows and (gasp) the edges of my nostrils…that’s new in recent times.  I don’t know if I just didn’t notice the nose hairs before and people were too nice to say anything, as if I had a piece of spinach in my teeth, or whether they are the latest arsenal in the facial hair war against my youthful visage.

My sister and I have a running joke.  She will lose five pounds at the same time I seem to pick up five – we believe now that through some quirk of nature we are actually sharing the same five pounds and that they are travelling from Illinois to California and back again.  My son, Andy, was lamenting the other night that his hairline seems to have receded a bit “overnight.”  “It happened so FAST!” he said.  Uh huh.  I think I know where his hair went.