There was once a time when I believed balding was a religious choice. I was young and seated in the back pew of Sunday mass when I noticed all the grown men in front of me had shiny bald spots that shone so bright that if you squinted, looked like washed out halos. Shortly thereafter I went to my first Bat Mitzvah where I made the assumption that Christians shaved a sacred circle in their heads while Jews wore yarmulkes. I had no explanation, it was just an observation, and when you think about it, I wasn’t so far off. Balding does in fact have a lot to do with destiny, but I’ve come to realize it’s less of a sectarian destiny than a genetic one.
My genetic curse.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not bald yet, buuuuuuut…
While my Dad has a pretty great head of hair for a sixty-year-old, I’ve read and heard over and over that this doesn’t matter.
It’s kind of like saying your neighbor just won a Corvette in a charity auction; it’s great for him but probably won’t affect your life too much. No, I know that it’s my Gramps that I have to worry about. And that’s probably why I’m pouring over old photo albums of my mother’s father. I want to know what kind of coverage he had when he died at the age of seventy.
Unfortunately for me, Gramps had a chrome dome and according to the photos, sported a wispy, unconvincing comb-over that flapped like a flag in the wind. I was too young to remember, but I can’t imagine that even I was fooled. And now, as I examine my own plot of hair with a hand mirror, from all angles and under multiple different lighting scenarios, I fear that I too will be facing some hard choices in the future.
Luckily, I’m not freaking out about balding with quite the passion and pizzazz of my early-20s, when I feared my hairline was receding faster than the glaciers. Ah those good old, hyperaware days when I neurotically combed my fingers through my shoulder-length hair just to see how many were falling out. My hand rake culled one and three and six strands with each pass, over and over obsessively make me stop, please. I couldn’t, for the life of me, quit until I came up empty-handed, which happened about as often as rolling snake eyes in Monopoly. When I finally did I should have felt relief, but it was tough to relax with enough hair on my desk to knit a scarf.
Torture is a euphemism for what I subjected myself to.
Eventually however, I wisened up. My hippie shag was way too long so every fallen hair looked as significant as a logged Sequoia. Seeing several twelve-inch strands of my dark hair in my palm incited a sense of panic that swiftly snowballed and spun and swirled me into obsessive compulsion. I wondered how many of these I was losing and how often and so I culled and culled until finally I walked into a salon and threw down for a shorter style.
Now with my faux-hawk firmly in place, my hair looks fuller and I worry much less about balding, or my widow’s peaks, than I did with long hair. I’m not sure if my shedding has slowed or if it’s that my hair is much shorter, but I am happy to report that my shower drain takes much longer to clog. While I’m fairly pleased with my current hair count, I’m not nearly as optimistic about turning forty and fifty and beyond. It may be falling out slowly or slower, but falling out it is. In the front and the back.
And this, my friends, is why I’m fixated on the hairlines and hairstyles of older men. I take inventory of every possibility and project my future self onto that skin tone or jaw line. I pour over the pages of pop culture rags, scrutinize television or movie screens, and comb the streets to see what works and doesn’t, what to shoot for and what to avoid, and where I stand. Will I look better or worse than this man?
Fortunately, besides the rise and fall of my ego, this impulse doesn’t have any noticeable physical side effects. While I might be a little envious of Bono’s full mane in his late forties, I know it would never trigger an eating disorder. (Although, in fairness, if it were revealed that starving oneself could thicken things up, my finger would be jammed down my throat faster than you could say ‘bulimic’). I’d like to think I’m doing market research, for that day when I have to decide how I’m going to present myself. Will I be wild and sport the balding Ben Franklin like Graydon Carter, Editor-in-Chief of Vanity Fair, or thank my lucky stars and keep it short like Letterman?
In any event, I’m not worried about ever rocking the Gramps. The sports, movie and rock stars of today have fortunately turned the comb-over into an anachronism, like Polio or Polly-O-String Cheese. But I am concerned about how I will look when my dome betrays me and I’m left with two strips of a Mohawk and a dash of skin.
Maybe I should keep that yarmulke handy after all.
posted by Scott Keneally @ 10:19 AM
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