The Origin Story of Sheriff Triibeard

In 2009, our family moved from the Pacific NorthWET near Seattle, Washington, to Carson City in the high desert of Northwest Nevada. We became good friends with another family, and because of my white beard, they nicknamed me "Treebeard" after the well-known woodland character in J.R.R. Tolkien's stories. This family also has a Wii gaming system, and when I put my username into it, I spelled it "Triibeard" as a blend of my nickname and the game system. I've since used that nickname and that spelling as an online moniker on various web sites.

In 2014, I had an emergency craniotomy to remove a chronic subdural hematoma of unknown cause. The doctor was an excellent neurosurgeon but an admittedly lousy barber. Gratefully, my full physical (and presumably, cognitive) recovery was complete in several weeks, but my head looked like a football that had been given half a Mohawk hair cut with the 5-inch stitches quite prominent on the bare side.

"Get a hat," were the doctor's orders, so I bought my first wool felt cowboy hat to shade my nearly naked pate from the high desert sunshine. It has become a practical fashion fixture for me to this day.

In October of 2014, my oldest daughter was visiting friends in Sacramento, and they visited a LEGO® Store where for ten bucks you could rummage through bins of tiny parts to create three of the diminutive Minifigure characters. She made one to represent herself and one to represent her boyfriend at the time. For the third one, they found a white beard, a cowboy hat, and a blue shirt that they thought was a reasonable representation of me.

We met up later in the day at Old Sacramento, and they presented me with LEGO Triibeard. Is he an amazing match or what?