Social Distancing from Myself (Ewing)

As soon as I was furloughed from a job I had held for thirty-four years, I knew this was going to be a pandemic like no other. Though I had a second job to fall back on, that one, like many people’s, now required me to work from home. Suddenly I had time to reinvent myself.

I decided to start with my face. I’d been clean-shaven for sixty-nine years—never appearing in public with more than a day’s worth of untamed growth. This looming period of “house arrest” presented a perfect, private opportunity to answer a question I’d long asked myself: can I grow a beard?

It seems to me that all men must ask themselves this question at some point in their lives. But maybe it’s just the less hirsute ones like me. As a teen, I was a late sprouter of body hair. I well remember many uncomfortable—even mortifying—summer days at the suburban swim club when I would spend hours trying to keep my bare arms snug against my naked upper torso. Exposing my armpits would have revealed to my friends of both sexes—and to the fur-fixated world at large—that there was no hair there. This was especially hard to do during pool volleyball and dodge ball games, leading others to regard me not only as a hairless freak but also a lousy athlete. But, as I’ve said, I was never really very hairy, even as an adult who had to shave daily. My five o’clock shadow doesn’t show up until the end-of-work whistle blows in some far-flung Pacific Ocean time zone.

One advantage of growing a beard during an extended stay-at-home order is that no one except your family has to experience that agonizing time (I thought it might be four weeks) when the scraggly, pathetic growth on your face seems the result of inertia, apathy, or despair and not a conscious choice. But I got through it. And so did my wife and son, who, at other times over the years, have probably seen me looking even worse than I did while sheltering in place. Eventually the follicles filled in enough to present themselves as a beard—even to the uninformed.

The next step in my makeover was altering my wardrobe. This did not mean letting out the waists of my trousers so that they fit me better. It meant wearing entirely new and different items from the back of my crowded closet and the bottom of my overstuffed drawers. Since I was now working from home, there was a new emphasis on the casual—and on the tattered, the torn, and the decrepit (what my mom used to call my “play clothes”).

Out were the button-down dress and sport shirts and cuffed polyester and cotton pants that had constituted my work uniform for almost fifty years. In were neglected (or totally forgotten) t-shirts and sweat shirts accumulated over decades: a teal “Key Player” tee commemorating a bygone Strategic Plan at the Cleveland Museum of Art; a long-sleeved navy blue t-shirt emblazoned with the key art of the obscure 2002 Jonathan Demme movie The Truth About Charlie; a white sweatshirt sporting the Ewing family crest. (This one was snug—like being squeezed into an uninflated balloon.) Out were quiet, conservative colors like black, brown, and gray. In were loud rainbow shades signifying my new, liberated private life inside my house: a Seussical medley of red socks, blue socks, white socks, green socks; riotous shirts like the orange, yellow, and powder blue “Ewing family holiday Cancun 2003” tee; baby blue trousers that would probably get me pummeled in a redneck bar.

I even dug up some old, beat-up shoes, saving my good moccasins and wing-tips for the eventual return to work, or for a rainy day. (Water could actually saturate and sink my leaky temporary footwear.)

My transformation was fun for a while. But soon the novelty wore off. The new-car smell of the coronavirus quarantine quickly wafted into memory. My beard, never very long, became bothersome, scratchy, and irritating; I was literally itching to get back to clean-shaven normalcy. It also took more time to maintain the beard than it did to run an electric razor quickly and inattentively across my face once a day. So two or three months after it began growing, the beard came off.

Similarly, my vibrant wardrobe soon attained the psychic sameness that colors even my more subdued, “good” apparel. Clothes really don’t make the man. Though I continue to wear ragged pants and ugly shirts around the house, underneath them I am the same person I was before the quarantine: an unstylish, set-in-his-ways senior citizen yearning just to get out and get on with his prior life. Minus one job.

John Ewing is the Director of the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque and the former Curator of Film at the Cleveland Museum of Art. He used to freelance for various publications, but these days his writing is pretty much limited to short film blurbs for the Cinematheque website and calendar. He lives in Cleveland Heights with his wife Kathy, a real writer.