Missed it by a Hair
The Source
Once upon a time in a land not so far away I had hair. I don’t remember it clearly, but I’ve seen pictures. Hair. Blond hair. (Stop that image going through your mind right now. I was better looking than that.) I don’t remember exactly when I misplaced it, but my early pictures in the Triopia yearbooks show me with a stylish swath of blond hair tossed across my forehead. Of course my forehead was much smaller then so it didn’t take a great deal of hair to cover the acreage. The problem is that when you lose your hair people look upon you as somehow challenged, suffering a severe handicap. So far the only handicap I’ve seen to baldness is having people feel sorry for me because I’m bald. From what I’ve read the propensity for having hair or losing it may come chiefly from your mother’s side of the family. The primary baldness gene is on the X chromosome. When my mother’s relatives used to meet it looked like someone had opened an egg carton. If there was a hair in the family reunion potato salad then it must have come from an in-law. Our old family pictures look like the row of bowling balls on the ball return. It gets really funny when I’m in a conversation with a few folks and someone mentions something about baldness. The conversation stops, eyes quickly glance in my direction then glue themselves to the floor. Someone has spoken the taboo word and they all wait for me to collapse onto the floor in puddle of self-loathing and pity. Hey, let’s you and I time ourselves getting ready in the morning. If you have hair then I’ll be eating breakfast while you’re still putting on deodorant. When I travel and end up with a hairy roommate I find myself twiddling my thumbs in the morning, waiting for my co-lodger to get ready, doing his hair. Who else but a bald man can shampoo his hair with a sponge? Nearly two out of three men will begin to bald by the time they reach 60 according to research, and although there’s no known cure for baldness American males will spend $1 billion this year thinking there might be. Maybe a few brain cells slip loose attached to each follicle of hair. A lady once told me that her brother had come up with a homemade remedy for growing hair, and when I told her that I didn’t miss my hair at all it seemed to either hurt her feelings or she assumed I was going loony. It was hard to tell. A bald man fascinates babies. As we grow and mature we learn how to mask our fascination with strange and exotic things, but a baby will stare at my head in wonder and if the child is close enough he or she will often reach out and try to land a hand on what appears to be a moonscape. When I add a white beard to my baldness then walk through White Oaks Mall on the week before Christmas little heads turn as they view what looks like Santa doing his shopping out of costume. For many it completely ruins the Elves’ Workshop idea. Yes, the jokes are plentiful. “Hey look! His neck is blowing bubbles!” “I was going to buy a book on baldness, but the pages kept falling out.” “He’s so bald you can see what’s on his mind.” The only real disadvantage I’ve found in being bald comes when I play a role onstage. I sit at the makeup table beside the actors watching them dab on a bit here and a bit there, but I have this landing strip atop by head and I become the most expensive actor at the table with the amount of Mehron Celebre Pro-HD Cream Foundation it takes to cover my runway. And best of all, shaved heads are now much in style. I look at some of my heretofore-hairy hombres and see that every few days they must spend many minutes with their razors trying to cultivate the look that comes naturally to me. The only real irritation comes when someone can’t control the urge to reach out and pat me on top of my head. Makes me feel like a poodle. When I was very young I sported a burr haircut and the same thing happened. People like to touch and pat you, which is all good and well if you’re a pet hamster. Bottom line: We ask no sympathy, dear world. Those of us born without the customary eternal follicles are not to be pitied. We’re doing just fine. It may be raining for two minutes before you even realize it, but a bald man is the first to know.