The other day a friend asked me, how often do you shave?
I was about to answer, when I realized that he was not looking at my face but my head.
I am bald, shorn of all accoutrement which made Samson bring down pillars and palace. I am so by choice. And by genetic disposition.
I was once brilliantly coiffured, sporting plumage that would have made a bowerbird proud. Not only would I shake my curls from time invitationally like a red breasted blue footed booby, to continue the avian analogy, but I was also ready to be preened by a member of the opposite sex as they would run their fingers through my locks till I said ouch. I also had very thick tangled growth.
And then like the snow and ice caps melting in Antarctica without so much as a say so, it started to go south on me!
I looked at the mirror one day and saw that I actually had a very large head. It hadn’t ballooned overnight but because it didn’t have the forestation to give it vertical dimension, it was like a large unsightly clearing in the Amazon. It was surrounded as are by definition clearings, by remnants of the rain forest. Remnants are just that:remnants.
Not the majestic original hardwood trees, but the thin scrawny specimens of lesser species. Who even knew if they were trees in the first place? Maybe they were just parasitic lianas, deprived of sustenance by their original hosts?
Truth be told it was not a very attractive sight.
Of course if I was given an exaggerated Scottish accent and a few more inches in height and width around the chest, I might have carried all this off Connery fashion.
No such luck.
So I examined this all very objectively and said if I don’t have it let me flaunt it.
Emboldened and somewhat smugly satisfied by this Oscar Wilde meets Groucho Marx epigrammatic wit, I took myself to the barber. Take it all off I said like the Vicar said to the Duchess.
Ten years later I am bald.
Now even if wanted to it won’t come back.
The iceberg has melted in the warmer seas.
The top soil has gone.
It will not return. And all it will do is reflect the sun on a bright day or the full moon when hairy werewolves go gamboling in the few forests that are left for them to gambol in.
written 2012
So It Got Me Thinking 