Do you know who you look like?

When I met Clay he was at the tail end of recovering from a terrible bicycle accident. He was riding along the street and was struck from behind by a car. The person driving the car sped off and left Clay, who was then 18, lying on the road unconscious.

Thankfully his injuries were not life threatening, but his face would be forever scarred.

The flesh was torn from his cheek, eye, lip and chin on the right side of his face. The doctor's stitched him back together and he went home to recover. He couldn't eat solid foods for a couple weeks due to his swollen face. Clay quickly lost twenty pounds, and as you can imagine, he really didn't have twenty pounds to sacrifice.

The young Clay I met in drawing class was painfully skinny. He had a deep purple scar on his right cheek bone that was hard not to stare at when I was talking to him.

When goatees and sideburns became popular in the early 90's, Clay was one of the first guys to jump onto the facial hair wagon. Unfortunately, the skin on his chin and lip that had been damaged from the bicycle wreck were too new to allow whiskers to grow. So he had a rather lopsided beard and strange gap in his moustache.

As the years passed Clay regained a few of those lost pounds, the scars faded and his skin had toughened up enough to allow whiskers to sprout thick and wiry through his scars. That's when he started getting a lot of comments like, 'Do you know who you look like?' As absurd as I thought it was that anyone could possibly resemble Clay, it was hard to deny that there was a striking look of familiarity between this one guy and Clay.

Yep. Hard to deny. There is something very Clayish about Nicolas Cage.

But, honey, you are much cuter, goofier and I'm so glad you still have that scar on your lip....it's very yummy.