The Anti-Beard-Speech Big Leagues

In college, I specialized in elaborate arguments against beards for young men. I honed my phrases and syntax. I worked to discover new appeals, new means of persuasion. I labored over the anti-beard speech, and thought to make it my own.

In a single day---today---I have been forced to admit that I'm simply out of the big leagues. No matter how I work at it, I will never equal Dad in the delivery and execution (and sheer maleness) of his anti-beard speech.
I did not know that my father had this little gem stored away among his lawyer-crafted stock. I had no idea. But as I stood there hunting for the stuffed-crust pizza amid a herd of teenagers, I caught out of the corner of one ear my father's voice and paused to listen... and then forgot the pizza and stood enthralled.

I must set the scene. Dad was lounging nonchalantly against the warehouse wall on Packing Day, a festival held at Lampstand Press whenever we have mass shipping to be done, on which teenagers from all over the church gather to be paid for packing our boxes and eating our pizza. It was lunchtime, hence the pizza, and Dad had a piece of melted-cheese goodness in one hand. Every so often he would gesture with it towards the three or four people in front of him. One was a small boy, perhaps ten years old. Another was Nate, my 26-year-old eldest brother. The third was a boy-man aged 20, on whose chin sprouted the dubious growth of adolescence.

I only caught the tail end of the discussion, and can only quote it imperfectly:

"Now, a man," my father was saying, with a wave of his pizza towards Nate, "might not shave. And if he doesn't, his beard-bristles are thick enough and dark enough that he will only look more manly that way. And a boy," here the pizza gestured towards the little round-eyed fellow, "won't find any difference between shaving and not shaving." My father glanced at me, "Same thing for girls." He went on, and here leveled his twinkling blue eyes on the 20-year-old, "But the one person, if you think about it,"---pausing for effect---"the one person who really benefits from shaving, is the person between the ages of 16 and grown-up, who, without shaving, simply looks like a downy chick."

"Ouch!" said the boy-man, not offended but definitely feeling the jab.
"Score!" I thought, adding that it was a nice touch on Dad's part to say "grown-up" rather than setting a definite age.
Nate merely smiled, and the little boy's eyes perhaps grew a little rounder, thus illustrating perfectly the different between a man and a boy.

Now I have grown accustomed and even jaded to downy adolescents during my years in college. "Boys will be boys." But today, watching a master at work, I feel persuaded that boys will not always be boys, and that eventually some of them may become men capable of arguing with as much poise, cool logic, and twinking, uncondescending compassion as my splendid father.