If you ever read The Oregonian, you may have seen the ad for the plastic surgery clinic that shows before and after photos of a man and woman who have supposedly had surgery on their faces to counteract the ravages of time. Of course, I most strongly relate to the picture of the guy. The “before” picture shows him gazing camera left with an expression that's probably supposed to look steely and masculine. The trouble is, it's hard to pull off The Look when you've got Deputy Dawg's jowls. In the “after” photo, he's posed the same but looks less like a bloodhound and his chin seems maybe a little more prominent. I recognized the slight improvement but I couldn't have told you why.

But after seeing the ad repeatedly, something struck me … in the before picture, the guy was cleanshaven. After, he had a Vandyke gray whiskered beard. He did, in fact, look less wrinkly and saggy, but as near as I could tell it had nothing to do with plastic surgery and everything to do with the facial camouflage he was wearing. He has an organic chin augmentation!

This is all lead-in to a grooming strategy you may have already caught on to, especially if you happen to know a 60-something gentleman who has grown those gray whiskers over any or all of his neck, face, jowls, cheeks or chin. I expose these secrets at some risk of sanction by the Brotherhood of the Brush, my generational compatriots who follow the fashion of wearing white beards. They might not want it known that they're self-correcting an otherwise clinical issue with the simplest of homegrown remedies for vanity's sake.

But call me a public servant. Civilization's right to know trumps personal vanity, I say.

Since half of the population, including nearly all of my women acquaintances, don't shave their faces, let me set the stage for this discussion. Ladies, tautness becomes essential when shaving the face. It's as if you in your morning ablutions had to yank enough slack out of the skin dangling from your upper arms to draw a blade effectively across it underneath. Face it, you'd need a third hand. For a guy the equivalent is to haul a jowl up toward the eye then back across the ear, maybe finally over the Adam's apple to achieve the artificial taut smooth surface required for an effective hair harvest.

Try shaving a bloodhound.

And afterward, the result is still a less-than-flattering exposure of the slack doughy folds of tissue in cheek and jowl as they seek their ultimate angle of repose in pendulous folds down around your belly. So there's a pre-disposition for us to not shave.

The guy in the ad has sagging jowls behind a chin that, though holding its historical position and contour, has taken in the new context the likeness of a cocktail onion squeezed between two Parkerhouse dinner rolls. It's unclear what corrective measures the plastic surgeon is alleged to have applied to the guy's face, whether jowl reduction, a neck wrinkle treatment of some sort, or a drawstring on the back of the head, but what is clear is that what was really wanted was furry plumage as a disguise.

Now here's the real inside story. Next time you see one of us walk by, check out the chin. Do you know where it actually ends and the whiskers begin? Is it out there by the sculpted edge of the fuzz or back somewhere closer to the lower lip? The jawline:What are you seeing? Truly a masculine chiseled straight edge, or a carefully clipped border meant to suggest a jawline where one no longer exists. Is that really a symmetrical squared visage or just carefully managed facial topiary hiding a face sagging like a backyard compost pile after a gravity storm?

It appears we still entertain the notion that we can regain or maintain the excitement of our younger days by building, acquiring, or vicariously participating with the mechanical dream objects of our youth. You can see the evidence of my observations at any hot rod, sports car, classic car, Harley-Davidson, road race, drag race, air race, aerobatic, off road, oval track, NASCAR or fly-in event where the preponderance of gray whiskers is not otherwise explainable. After all these years we have time and a modicum of money to spend but we'd rather spend them at the tabernacles of the dreams we've had since high school than at the plastic surgeon's.

It's the irony of the age that we grow old-guy whiskers to feel younger. Yeah, we want to look like we're still in the game, but we're not about to squander our hot-rod money!

Steve Gorthy is a Dixonville gaffer who maintains a friendship with a clean-shaven retired otorhinolaryngologist. There's a home workshop full of tools and hot rods involved. And a certain fearlessness about using them. Just in case. He can be reached at gorthy57@hotmail.com.