Shortly after the Record-Eagle offered me the opportunity to write this every other week column they dispatched a reporter with a camera that stopped by my office and casually snapped the photo that has run with every column that I ever submitted.
It was fine, it looked just like me, and it became “the face of the franchise,” not to oversell its importance.
Until today’s column, that is. Check out the updated image and let’s talk about it for a minute.
On second thought let’s just let the picture do the talking. Because, for me, looking at photos of myself ranks up there with listening to my recorded voice or reading old columns.
“Hate” is a strong word but when it comes to listening to my voice … ugh. I hate the pitchy, nasally, upper Midwestern chirpiness that comes through to my ear. I feel almost the same way with pictures, except that I’ve seen my photo enough times to accept that it’s me and there’s not much I can do about it.
As for reading old columns, it’s not necessarily the sight or sound, but I almost always see things that I wish I’d either written differently or perhaps not at all.
When you read any particular column, book, or poem do you try to imagine what the author’s voice sounds like, at least in your head? My favorite part of reading most any piece of literature is the chance to imagine how the author sounds, not just the book’s characters. With my columns there are rarely characters other than the frequent bits of dialogue I’ll use to set certain scenes; it’s primarily just my words. Today you get the words, of course, but you also get a visual aid from my photo.
Like the sound of my voice or reading old columns, the new photo puts me on a bit of an edge. I’ll never be totally comfortable opening this part of the paper seeing the face I know best smiling back at me, and I’ll always remember that the picture was taken just an hour or so after having trimmed the biggest beard of my life down to this size.
Beyond all that introspection, you undoubtedly notice that beard. Off and on over my adult life I’ve sported a number of different shapes, sizes and colors of them. This one, my whitest beard ever, was just recently trimmed to this length. At the outset of the COVID pandemic, when barber shops were shuttered, I allowed things to get quite long. From the spring of 2020 until just last week, the beard grew from trimmed and shaped decency to day-after-Christmas-Santa-Claus messiness. Having the long beard was fun and became part of my persona, but eventually, it just became tiresome.
One of the ironies of this whole photographic discussion is that most of my career was spent real estate industry-adjacent. As a title examiner and closing agent, hardly a day went by without some sort of contact with business card-carrying realtors. Further irony being that many of the pictures on those business cards, much like my old picture, were in need of updates. I remember joking about those pictures from time to time with those that I felt comfortable with doing so. It’s been a few years since my last closing, but I hope that none of them are reading this and choking on their morning coffees.
Thanks to award-winning Record-Eagle photographer Jan-Michael Stump, we no longer have an old photo, just a photo of me looking a little older.