A couple of years ago while waiting for a bus at a stop near the local bus loop the driver stepped out of his vehicle for a break. I was immediately struck by his hair. He was middle aged, perhaps still in his forties with long flowing brown hair that fell well past his shoulders. And a pronounced bald spot. To put it mildly he looked ridiculous, like an ageing rocker obstinately refusing to put his wild youth behind him where it belonged. Then I saw a man about my age and a near identical male pattern baldness looking at him as well. His silver hair was even shorter than mine, and I keep my hair very short, and it was clear we were both thinking the same thing. I turned and said to him, "And that is why I keep my hair short." He muttered in reply, "I don't blame you. I don't blame you one bit."
I used to have long hair, back in my wild and reckless youth. In 1970 when I was fourteen I was letting it grow, well past my ears, just when I was starting to smoke pot and explore alternative life styles (I was in many but not all ways an early bloomer). To my parents' horror and distress I let it grow down to my shoulders. I had in those days beautiful hair. It was wavy, curly, tangled and tawny, bleached by the sun and with my then fine elfin features I was outlandishly beautiful. My ultra conservative working-class father was particularly scandalized by my unmasculine tresses and when I went to live with him and his girl friend for three very long months he ordered me to get it cut. I refused and when he saw that I wouldn't budge and that at the age of seventeen he would not be able to force me, he relented. Three months later he kicked me out of his house, for no real reason except that he could no longer stand the sight of me and my relentlessly growing hair and I was condemned to finish my grade twelve in a small town on Vancouver Island living with my mother and her fat studly Romeo.
My long hair was for me a symbol of not simple rebellion but of liberation. Like most boys growing up in the sixties I was made to always have my hair cut military or Kennedy-era short. My family and home environment were for me an oppressive and miserable nightmare. Allowing my hair free reign to grow and blow in the wind was my signature of personal freedom as I resolved to break out of the prison of my family home, which was made all the easier by my parents' bitter divorce when I was thirteen. In Toronto in 1975 when almost everyone else was getting their hair cut I followed suit, then in early 1976, just before my twentieth birthday, I noticed it was beginning to recede from the front. To my surprise I was not alarmed and immediately accepted and embraced my new look of gathering maturity. At twenty-seven I began to cut it very short since a balding head does not suit hair of any length beyond one inch. I learned to cut my own hair, not with great skill, but soon became rather good at it. This was after my first three grey hairs appeared. I had already been through hell in my life and was at the time working in health care and already had experienced my first couple of deaths since I was among other things working in palliative care. I welcomed the grey. I had earned it. In June 1991 while visiting Edinburgh, Scotland, in a local drug store I bought a barber's scissors that I still use to this day twenty-two years later. Ironically, it was on Father's Day that I made the purchase and Edinburgh is the city where my paternal grandfather was born. I believe that cutting my own hair for the past thirty years has saved me thousands of dollars. Through my forties and into my fifties my hair has become more sparse and greyer. I cut it daily now, usually three snips every morning, following my daily shave and preceding my morning shower. It feels almost like a sacred rite, a fresh offering of my life to God through the sacrifice of three snips of hair every morning. I have found that this is also a great way of maintaining a well groomed appearance.
Balding prematurely has of course aged my appearance. My face itself is rather young for a fifty-seven year old, but people generally notice the baldness first and often automatically assume that I am five to fifteen years older. Even in my forties service staff in stores, especially young ones, were already offering me the senior's discount and I can only hope that such a thing will still exist in seven years time when I will be eligible for my pension. Younger people now sometimes offer me their seat on the bus and of course I accept because I do want to encourage good behaviour in young people, and some people seem almost shocked when I tell them I haven't retired yet.
A lot of women, such as my mother, begin dyeing their hair as soon as the first grey appears and even in their eighties and nineties continue to colour it so that they will never have the pleasure of seeing themselves with grey hair. The pressure to look young is so intense that it creates in us a lot of bizarre behaviour due to the resulting self-hatred. I should also mention the many balding men who grow their hair long on one side and flip it over to create the comb over (in Japan they call this style the "bar-code") or they shave it all off in the lame hope that they will look sexy, or younger, or not really bald, but this really is just another kind of comb-over. I won't mention here the various hair-replacement therapies and anti balding scams that men get duped into trying and paying the annual equivalent of the economy of a small country, though I just have. And yes, there will always be wigs and toupees. But wigs do serve a purpose, for women especially undergoing chemo and radiation therapy who lose their hair. This is often a tragic event for a woman, almost as dire as losing a breast that they are hoping to spare from the ravages of cancer. Even though it was stylish for a while for young women to shave their heads bald it didn't last very long, I think because there is almost an archetypal fear that many women have of losing their hair.
There is so much symbolic weight and baggage about hair. Remember the dumb blonde jokes now no longer in vogue because they are even worse than politically incorrect? They are actually downright offensive (and hilarious!). Or how about the legendary bad tempered redhead? Well, my mother was a redhead and she was not known for her serenity. The multi-billion (or trillion?) dollar industry of hair dressing and hair styling really betrays how many of us hate our appearance and how much value we place on our hair without which there is no remaining evidence of having good health, sex appeal or general attractiveness. It can also make or break a promising job interview. I am sure I have been turned down for many positions because I am losing my hair and this makes me appear older, less attractive and less marketable. Even people who have never read the Bible are familiar with the story of Samson and Delilah, who cut off his hair and that this caused him to lose his legendary strength.
Hair only really interests me if it is hair that has been coloured with every hue of the spectrum, a fashion begun in the seventies by the punks which has since become mainstream but I still love this. It draws the attention away from the hair and away from the person wearing the hair and instead to the glorious emerald green, or cyan blue, or pomegranate red, or deep purple (the shade not the classic rock band). The woman or man carrying these colours adorning their head becomes an instrument that celebrates that colour and if I have one single regret for going bald it is simply this: that I will never be able to really legitimately dye my hair a stylin' peacock blue.
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