A couple weeks ago I took a cellphone picture of my face and sent it in a text to my friend Bob Milner with the message, “Twins us?”

Bob: “OK.”

That was a polite response obliquely asking, what is this about?

Me: “I shaved off my goatee, looked in the mirror and said, ‘I’m Bob Milner!'”

Me again: “I’ll try to look more pleasant as your doppelganger.”

I had kind of a sour look on my face in the picture.

Bob: “I thought it was Tom Sellick, someone I don’t think I look like at all but you might want to doppelgang with him rather than me.”

Me: “Well, if YOU think I look like Tom Selleck then YOU must look like Tom Selleck, too, so things are great.”

Bob: “Yes they are my friend.”

I was trying to remember how many years It had been since I switched from mustache to goatee. I recalled that when I made a humorous bid for President in 1996, promoting it in my column, I wrote that a goatee gave me a slight sinister look, helpful when dealing with bad guys like the Russians.

Then I realized all I had to do was look back in my files and see when my column picture changed from ‘stache to goatee. Yep, it was mid-1996.

If you look at my high school yearbook picture, you’ll see a straight arrow in a suit coat with Buddy Holly glasses and hair almost too short to comb. I first grew a mustache when I went to college at WVU, sometime after 1968. It was a poor wispy thing, but felt in tune with the times. By the mid-’70s I had long dark hair with a nice wave to it. The mustache was respectably thick and slightly drooping on the ends. After I came to work as a reporter and photographer for The Review in 1980 the hair got shorter but the ‘stache remained.

Once, just once, in the ’90s I shaved it off for fun. Daughter Shark was shocked and distressed at the sudden, unexpected change in her father’s looks. So was son Worshrag, just a little tyke at the time. Seed, a young teen, didn’t care or at least acted like it. My wife was unhappy. She kept staring at my clean upper lip, saying it looked two inches high. I thought I looked weird, too, and grew back the mustache right away.

After I retired in 2016, and Honey and I would pass an old guy walking along the highway whose bushy white hair and beard looked like he was peering through a ring of pillow stuffing, I would tell my wife, “Pretty soon I’ll look just like that,” but for the most part I didn’t. . . until earlier this year when I let a full beard grow.

When I say “full,” I mean “all there is,” because my grizzled beard is sparse on the cheeks. The beard was fun, but after a couple months I was tired of it. Plus, with upcoming dental and skin cancer surgery it would be kindness to the medicos to clear off their work area.

First I shaved my chin, which I hadn’t seen in 30 years.

“Hey, look, I’ve got a mole,” I told my wife.

I trimmed the beard to loopy muttonchops rising to a Fu Manchu. “You remind me of Martin Van Buren,” one grandson said. I thought I looked like a biker beard. My wife didn’t know what it looked like, but she hated it.

So now it’s just the ‘stache, probably from here on out. They say the mustache is coming back. Nice. I can claim to be trendy.

Yep, trend-setters Tom Selleck, Bob Milner and me.