Living While Bald

(Letter of Recommendation-"Balding")

I am 66 years old, having spent more than half of my life staring at the open spaces on top of my head where thousands upon thousands of hair follicles died a cruel and untimely death. 

I forever tell myself that I am perfectly comfortable in my skin (for that is the only universe my head has known in decades) but the sad truth is I am not. 

I have periodically grown facial hair, the mustache through the 80's and 90's, in retrospect a definite mistake, or the on again off again (in multiple senses) affair with a full beard. Yet this experiment inevitably ends with the realization that this effort is fooling no one into believing I could be cast in the lead in a remake of "Hair".

I definitely still have hair envy even as more and more of my contemporaries join the ranks of the follically challenged. One or two of my friends retain every fiber and strand from their youth. I gaze upon them with equal measures of awe and disgust.

A further complication is that I have no eyebrows, lost somehow in a storm, or maybe burned off when I tried to light the stove. Compounding the problem is the inescapable realization that my face is perfectly round. In my self portrait, there is virtually no distinction between my face and an eight pound Caucasian bowling ball.

I once inadvertently shaved my head (that is a separate tale) but I bore an uncanny resemblance to Uncle Fester. Thus, the few remaining holdouts on the sides of my head are now cut back only to a "two." Like a bowling ball with a shadow on each side.

For nearly a half century I wore contact lenses but I basically abandoned them in recent years for several reasons. One was that glasses give my face some definition that is otherwise lacking in a bald man with no eyebrows and virtually no upper lip. Oh, I may have forgotten to mention that one other minor defect.

I have never been a fan of hairpieces because, well they mostly look like hairpieces. Or maybe it had something to do with the fear of seeing my hair on top of a styrofoam head in the bathroom in the middle of the night.

And I was too lazy to sign up for that experimental trial they were running decades ago on a sample group to determine if they could regrow hair (it was probably for minoxidil or some other equally useless product).

Anyway, for myriad reasons, none very good, I remain a landing area for local planes and will likely be one for the rest of my days. 

I always thought that the perfect name for a company specializing in bringing back what was not irretrievably lost would be "Gone Today, Hair Tomorrow." Only, in my case, my follicle disappearance would just be entitled, "Gone Boy."