Rosy Glow – Hair Loss

By

Bob LaTorre

            N.B. This is another Rosy Glow by Cousin Bob written over 25 years ago.

Nature has a way of doing strange things to us as we grow older. We thicken a bit around the middle, get a bit shorter of breath, and run out of energy earlier in the day.

Some of us lose all of our hair, while others turn prematurely gray. (It is always premature graying because none of us are ready for it.)

I happen to be one of those who suffers from hair loss. But in my case it is of the cruelest kind. At the back of my head the hair the hair remains thick and full. A bit flecked with gray perhaps but, there is no skin showing anywhere. In the front however I am in a race with time. Like the “Picture of Dorian Gray” my hair recedes almost as fast as I age. I am left to speculate whether I will run out of years or hair first.

I don’t dwell on the problem often. Except when someone takes a photograph of me from a high angle, which in my case is just about every time. However when I was getting my hair cut the other day, my young hair dresser remarked that the hair at the back of my head was getting very thick. “Too bad,” she remarked, “That we could not move some of it to the front of your head.” Ah!, What a profound bit of philosophy was summed up in those few words. Too bad we can’t move some of it to the front.

But that is precisely what we need to do with all of our short comings. How many times have we spoken the wrong words at the wrong moment and wished that we could move the next moment back in time, kind of like moving the hair to the front of our heads.

Then there are the decisions we have made which later wisdom proved incorrect, how we wish we could change positions on those matters?

And so it goes all through life we find that we are wishing for the impossible. It I were balding in the back and not in the front I could at least wear a hat to cover my baldness. In life I could have covered my mistakes if they had been made in a different way.

There are people who do try to effect those changes. How many times have you seen men who comb the hair from the back of their head to the front in an unsuccessful attempt to cover the balding? It is never very effective. The same holds true when we attempt to make up for some error in the social graces. How do you fill in the conversation when a group has been speaking in uncomplimentary terms about someone and unexpectedly that person enters the room? The right words are about as hard to come by as moving our hair to the front of our heads. More than anything, growing up, maturing is a matter of learning to find our strength and learning to live with our weaknesses. It is a long slow process and that is why it takes most of us so long. Sadly some of us never really make it to maturity. We see the result of that every day. The adult-children who must have bigger and more expensive toys, and the professional athletes whose behavior is often worse than a child.

Wife abusers who because of their immaturity never learned in Kindergarten not to hit people.

I guess nature gave me a break after all. I need only to look into the mirror to be reminded of my age, those bald spots are like beacons pointing the way to maturity.

Why when summer comes and I spend some time in the sun all of that skin will turn bright red and I will be given a different kind of….Rosy Glow.