I had forgotten this little fact of medical culture, but while illnesses pass away, their medications often live on, in a small but lively prescription drug exchange program among friends. I was reintroduced to this black market by an old friend who called to say that, if I need it, she has extra Vicodin from a previous illness. Another friend tells me she's a beneficiary of two of my medications and has a few leftover doses on hand. If that's not enough, she knows someone with an especially wide holding who has her cross-referenced under Ambien and Prednisone.

The focus is on mood enhancers or pain relievers, but I don't see much to worry about. Most of the offers are symbolic. The hidden market in meds is not a sign of addiction but a statement of principle that in the land of worry and pain, friendship trumps the law. As anyone knows who has a sadist for a doctor, it's not the person who cries for relief that's a coward, but the one who withholds it. Modern medicine without kindness can be hell. Luckily, I'm well supplied; my tube of Oxycodone hasn't dipped an inch since my pain started to recede.

My real dread, and I can't stop thinking about it, is losing my hair. Nurse Jill tells me the process starts at the top and moves down, to the eyebrows, the beard, and beyond. On some level, I suppose, it's something to look forward to. Of all the persistent side effects that can come with chemo, the end of hair production is the kindest, a daily reminder that the treatment is working. Still, I have mixed feelings. In my family, holding on to your hair meant a lot.

When why father fled from Los Angeles to Mexico in 1950 he had little time to pack or consider a plan. He'd learned earlier that morning that a federal marshall

was looking for him with a subpoena to appear before the then mighty House UnAmerican Activities Committee. The Committee was investigating communism in the film industry and identifying communist screenwriters, producers, and directors who might be undermining the nation by slipping anti-American messages into the movies. The consequences of not cooperating with the members of the Committee were severe. They could send you to Federal Prison for contempt of Congress. My father grabbed his passport and drove for the Mexican border that afternoon. It may have been the worst day of his life. My mother was three thousand miles away in Boston recovering from hip surgery; he had to leave my brother Jim and me (Jim was eight and I was five) with my aunt Janet and a former housekeeper who had become a family friend—and leave us with a lie. He told us he was going north to San Francisco for a visit, not south to another country to stay out of jail. He didn't want us to know the real story or his real destination in case anyone came to the house expecting cooperation from his children, too.

The FBI already had our house under surveillance and would be on the lookout for him: a short man in his late forties with a Jewish face, thinning dark hair, and a grayish beard. If he shaved he might make it undetected to the border, but he would no longer resemble his passport picture, and Mexican border guards had a reputation for turning you away on the least suspicion.

He kept his beard_and his freedom—and made it to Mexico City in a few days.

I inherited that passport. A few months after he died, when I was seventeen, I found it in his office desk. He had never renewed it. After we returned from Mexico, he was happy to stay put, far from politics, writing quietly at home. He did keep the beard, though, till one afternoon, a few years after our return to the States, he shaved it off. My mother brought him into the living room where I was watching television. I stood up to be introduced before I realized who it was. I had never seen him without a beard. I didn't recognize the face or its disconcerting expression of diffidence and shame.

I never quite felt at ease with that new face; it rarely smiled and as his heart condition worsened in the brutal winters of New Hampshire, it grew paler and more drawn with exhaustion and pain. By then I had taken to thinking of it as the face of Hugh G. Foster, the pseudonym my father adopted when it became clear no one was going to buy anything he wrote under his own name—the face of a man who was barely making a living. A face without the defiant eyes of the man in the passport picture, refusing to hand over anything to unfriendly minds, ready to face down anyone who dared to tell him what to think or how to make his way in the world.

When I grew a beard ten years ago, I was after a very different effect. I wanted to look, if not wiser, then more friendly and relaxed. I had been working over a year by then as the Host of a new international news program produced by American Public radio and the BBC, called The World. I had access to Ministers of State, shapers of public opinion and political policy, experts eager to answer my questions and respectfully offer their views, even the occasional military dictator or head of State eager to explain himself to me and convey the impression he cared what I had to say. I wonder what my father would have thought at the turn of events that had elevated his son from a life on the lam to the company of Ambassadors, Generals and Kings.

At home Harriet hung up a black-and-white publicity picture of me in my new beard next to a photo of my father taken in his little office in Studio City, not long before he fled. In our pictures we're about the same age. Side by side we look like brothers, with equally watchful eyes, but different smiles. One a practiced host, the other an uncertain guest of the world. One seemingly eager to listen, the other not too sure he'll be heard.

There's another snapshot of the bearded me, taken a few years later, where my resemblance to my father is far more striking. I don't own a copy of that

picture and I'm not eager to see it again. Like his passport photo, it was a portrait taken for official purposes and one I hope I never renew. A mug shot, front and side, the day five policemen came to our house, put me under arrest, and led me away in handcuffs, with my hands behind my back.

Isabel Ingram’s 1927 passport, photo by Ken Mayer,

published under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.