(Originally Published September 6th, 2016)

On the very last day of the 2015-16 academic school year, my beard was attacked by two rogue students. They came with a ferocity uncommon in teenagers, as their kind typically shambles slowly, unsure of the world or their place in it. 

Perhaps that description is unkind. (Not the shambling, mind you - the other thing). 

These students had some degree of permission, I suppose. Maybe they bought raffle tickets. And won the raffle. And I gave them the trimmer.  And the money from the raffle went to buying new books for my class (at least, I think it did. Where else could it have gone?).

Regardless. The damage. Was. Total.

The junior went first, taking whole chunks out of the left half of my beard. What remained was patchy, to say the least. The end result was the appearance of a goatee in the middle of my cheek, a style I had neither seen worn before nor replicated since. The next that took command of the trimmer, a freshman, was much kinder. She was apologetic, concerned that she might hurt me or my beard. I assured her that I would be just fine.

The beard, he was already lost. 

The final result was a mildly trimmed right side which bared a passing resemblance to a wave and a cheek-goatee on the left. It wasn't great. When I got home, my daughter said, with the ripple-scrunched nose of someone passing an open sewer, "I don't think that looks very good."

Noted.

By the end of the day my face was properly shaved and also quite cold. Until it's gone, you never realize how much a beard is basically a fuzzy blanket for your chin. Of course by the start of the current year the beard had returned to its previous glory. 

It will likely survive one hundred and seventy two school days this year, until that last day comes again. Then there will be violence done to my poor beard. Maybe zebra stripes or a lightning bolt or something?

Update: The 2016-17 school year ended with my beard surviving! It knew that it had seniors graduating, the first year it had shared a class of seniors, and it just could not imagine scarring those graduating students with pictures of a bare-faced Mr. Lydon after graduation. Will the beard continue to survive into the summer?