Hair Today
It’s been a long time since I had a normal men’s haircut.
I first grew my hair out long in 1991, soon after my wife left, and wore it long-sometimes down to my hips-for the next ten years. I was buying Pantene in two-liter jugs, but it was worth it. All the girls loved it, and the inevitable offers to brush it out or braid it were welcome at a time when I really needed some affirming attention. It was like discovering I had a hidden super-power!
The years passed, and my first grey hairs began to appear. They came in much coarser and wiry, and it didn’t make any sense to keep it long that way. I wasn’t even getting the girls anymore! So I figured it was time to get rid of it.
But before I did, I had one trick left that I wanted to try: I went and bleached the whole mane blond. It was ridiculously expensive and looked pretty terrible, but it was something I’d never be able to do again, so I went for it. To my friends’ consternation, it lasted about six months before I finally cut it down.
Naturally, I went from one extreme to the other, opting to keep my head close-shaved for the ten years that followed. Fortunately, my skull seems to be pretty reasonably shaped, so that look worked well for a long time, and it did a good job hiding the advancing grey.
Last summer, I decided to finally let my hair grow back out to a normal men’s length, so that I could get through the awkward intermediate-length stage while I was between jobs. I was finally beyond the point of trying to convince anyone of my youth, and I figured the grey would look “distinguished”, as my family have told me since childhood.
I grew up with the story that my father’s hair had gone grey by the time he graduated high school, and I’ve never known any adult on my father’s side of the family whose hair was anything but completely white. To me, it’s more surprising that my brother and I haven’t followed suit, staying salt-and-pepper the whole way. So although it wasn’t the greatest thing in the world, my going grey wasn’t any big, emotional trauma.
But growing it out last summer still presented a problem: it had been over twenty years since I’d had a normal men’s hair style. I had no idea what to do with normal hair, nor what my hair would do once it grew out!
So I kicked around ideas and experimented a little. I don’t want to have it long, because long grey hair looks horrible and ratty and sad, rather than distinguished. Think Riff Raff from Rocky Horror: not the image I want to cultivate! But I don’t want it too short either, because where’s the fun in that? Maybe I’d keep it short, except let it get a little longer in back, like a mullet? I dunno…
It was during one of those internal debates that I decided to look at the back of my head for the first time since I stopped shaving it. And that’s when I saw the great big thin patch on the top. Even after my hair has grown out very fully, I could still see my scalp! While I’m not bald (at this point!), there’s no arguing with the evidence that my hair has thinned. A lot!
If there’s one thing that doesn’t run in my family, it’s baldness. Although I did have two bald uncles, both of them married into the family and thus were not blood relations at all. The only cueball anywhere in my family tree was my maternal grandfather, Albert, whose name I inherited after he died a few months before my birth. I never even met the guy, yet I may have inherited his barren skull! Now that *would* be grounds for big, emotional trauma!
Is thinning hair that big an issue? Plenty of men wind up balding or with thinning hair, after all. And it’s not even a practical concern, because I just finished ten happy years with a shaved head, and I’d have no problem going back to that look.
Part of why it shocked me was that it was a sudden discovery, rather than a gradual one; I really hadn’t looked at my own artful dome since I stopped shaving it, so it was pretty disturbing to see it poking through the hair I’ve spent a year growing out.
And, of course, it’s another big chunk of undeniable (and sadly irreversible) evidence that I’m aging. Is aging such a bad thing? Well, I’ve spent most of my adult life taking pride in looking and acting as young as-if not younger than-my coworkers and friends. It’s been a big part of my self-image. But going bald really does put the lie to the saying that “You’re only as old as you feel”.
And writing about it doesn’t really help, either. This isn’t the kind of topic that you’d expect to read about if you visited a young man’s blog! And it’s not something I’d ever expected to write about, either…
I find that pretty ironic, because for me, aging feels a lot more like puberty than my teenage years ever did. As a teen, I was given several mysterious books full of frustratingly vague warnings of the confusing changes ahead for “our bodies”. I never did learn what all the fuss was about. Somehow, getting through adolescence never seemed like that big a deal, while the changes I’m going through now-dry skin, deteriorating eyesight, thinning hair, failing organs, ear and nose hair, skin tags, and other delights-are much more disconcerting than puberty ever was!
There’s one last little needling bit of irony, too. Years before the divorce and my accompanying decision to grow my hair long, my college friends got together and bought me my first CD player as a wedding gift.
Weeks earlier, in anticipation of that present, I’d gone into a CD store and bought my very first compact disc. Although CDs are old technology now, they were the big, exotic new audiophile thing back then. The store had the same bleeding-edge cachet as a 3-D printer “maker” shop might elicit today.
The album that had my attention at that time was an oldie even back then, but newly remastered and released on CD: Rush’s 1975 album, “Caress of Steel”. The memory of buying my first CD was burned into my mind during the two weeks I spent just staring at it while I waited to receive the gift I could use to actually play it!
One of my favorite tracks on the album… Well, Geddy Lee begins and ends it something like this:
I looked in the mirror today;
Click to view
My eyes just didn’t seem so bright.
I’ve lost a few more hairs.
I think I’m… I’m going bald.
I think I’m going bald!
…
My life is slipping away.
I’m aging every day!
But even when I am grey.
I’ll still be grey my way, yeah!