Moustache is misspelled

I am a child of the sixties.

OK, I'm actually a child of the fifties but that doesn't sound half as good and even makes me seem older than I am. I'm 62 now, an age I couldn't even imagine back then.

So, a seemingly endless succession of elementary schools throughout the San Fernando Valley of the 50's, followed by Walter Reed Junior High, then North Hollywood High School in the 60's, then on to San Francisco for college and the summer of love! 1967!

I started out pretty straight-laced; short cropped hair, clean shaved cheeks, neat in appearance all around. Then, within months, the hair started growing. So, too, the beard. But no matter what I did, how I dressed, my appearance was still agonizingly. . . neat.

I wore a cow bell on a leather strap around my neck. I bought a pair of blue and white striped denim pants, cut open the outer seam on the legs and inserted a red and white bandana so that the pant legs would flare, thus creating an approximation of American flag bell bottoms! I don't know what ever happened to those pants, or the bell. But I kept the beard for several years. Around 1970 or 71, I trimmed it down to a mustache.

That stayed with me until just recently. In fact, there are people in this life who have never seen me without it. There was a week, around 1975 when I shaved it off. But I grew it back, telling everyone that I had no upper lip. The truth was, I didn't know who I was without it. I had grown up being told- as a joke, of course- that I had been adopted because I didn't look like anyone else in the family. Also, my interests were quite different. And though I knew it was a joke-albeit not a very funny one- I took delight in being set apart from my family. So imagine my surprise when I first shaved and saw that my face was transforming, metamorphosing, from the me that I thought I knew to some one I didn't know at all. My father!

I did grow the mustache back right away. And kept it glued to my face for the next 35 years. Even when the hair on my head started turning gray, then white, and my mustache remained defiantly brown, I kept it. Even, shortly after my divorce, when I went online and was insulted by a young woman who said I would probably be attractive if I lost the seventies mustache, I kept it. Only recently, the last month or two, I think, have I shaved again. Initially, I was shocked anew to see my father staring out at me every morning from the bathroom mirror. But gradually I've come to admire the old man.

He wasn't such a bad looking guy after all!