There was a fellow that I worked with back in my days in the Subsistence Directorate and later on when I was in what was then called the Office of Telecommunications and Information Systems (OTIS) well over 30 years ago. He was what I would call a bullshit artist (BSA) and management loved him. It was not that he didn’t accomplish anything, but he was able to magnify what he did do in their eyes out of all proportion to its actual worth due to his BS ability.

I’ll call him Gabby Hayes. 

Anyway, Gabby’s hair was turning gray, apparently somewhat faster than he’d have liked, and he decided to do something about it. So one day he came into the office and he had dyed his hair a solid shade of black.

The problem was that the change was so sudden and so complete that it was obvious that it was a dye job and Gabby looked ridiculous.

Many years later as I was approaching my late youth, I noticed that both my hair and my beard were turning gray. I didn’t mind the hair so much, as it seemed to be metamorphosing at a reasonably stately pace, but the beard was entirely something else.

The beard seemed to have a mind of its own and was turning not just gray but downright white and at a much faster rate. So much so that when I went to Iovine Brothers Produce at the Reading Terminal Market, the cashiers were routinely giving me the senior citizen discount!

So I decided to do something about it.

Option A was to simply scrap the beard entirely. That would have solved the problem, but as I’ve had some sort of a beard, except for a few brief periods, ever since my college days, I didn’t much cotton to that idea.

Option B was to diet. Or rather dye it.

But having learned a lesson from Gabby, I knew better than to dye the whole thing all at once. Instead, I merely dabbed at the remaining flecks of brown that still existed and enlarged them slightly.

It worked!

No one suspected I was dying my beard. Or at least no one said anything to me directly.

The only comments that I received were to the effect that I had let my beard grow out a bit (I hadn’t; it was the same length as always).

A week or so later I enlarged the brown areas a little bit more. And I continued that until I thought I had gotten a reasonable compromise. I now had a roughly half and half brown and grayish white beard. Here’s a photo of me with the dyed beard. Without the dye the beard was entirely white.

The only downside was that now I was entering my late youth and I had reached the age where I was actually qualified to receive the senior citizen discount, but I was no longer getting it. Oh, well. Win some, lose some.

I kept that up for several years, and if anyone ever suspected I was dyeing my beard, they never said so to me.

I finally decided to stop dyeing it when it just became too much of a bother. I think that was during the pandemic when we were all wearing masks and no one could see the blasted thing anyway. 😜