When I was 15, I cut up one of my mother’s discarded nylons and coiled it around my head at night. I wanted curly locks to be straight –The Beatles and not Tom Jones.
Freud would have a field day with the nylon. But sometimes, a cigar is a cigar.
The frightening photo above was taken for my college graduation in 1971. That was two years after The Cowsills’ top ten hit Hair with these words:
Give me a head with hair
Long, beautiful hair
Shining, gleaming
Steaming, flaxen, waxen
By this time, the Beatles were no more. Instead, my hair model was Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo in the 1969 film Midnight Cowboy. On the parental front, I had gravitated from my mother’s legwear to my father’s disdain about my hair’s length. Nothing stayed the same for long in the sixties.
The photo below shows me with Rebecca at my 50-year college reunion.
I’m finally at peace with my head and face hair. My father would be proud. My mother’s old nylons could be turned into an onion/garlic rope.
But I’m still grooming as much as I did 50 years ago.
Because The Cowsills were wrong when they told us hair “would stop by itself.”
It doesn’t.
Worse, it now sprouts in places it never has before. At 23, birds could nest–thanks again, Cowsills–on top of my head. Now, my ears could be a condo duplex for a pair of hummingbirds.
Unless I trimmed & trimmed & trimmed.
What is it about men and their hair?
Below are my grooming instruments.
When we travel, I dump them into an airport-approved clear plastic bag. TSA pre-check is a godsend.
We visited the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum a few years ago. Lo and behold, a close-up profile of President Kennedy sitting beside a pool showed the elegant JFK with a tuft of hair protruding from his right ear.
Science suggests growing ear and nose hair in older men might be related to testosterone. (source) That was more than splendid for John. For me, we all have burdens to manage.
Yesterday, sunny, standing late afternoon at a west-facing window with the magnifying mirror pictured above cupped next to my left ear, the little silver battery-operated razor in my right hand, I was thinking about Ricky Gervais’ Netflicks series After Life that we finished the night before.
After Life is about death, among many other things. What about my ear and nose hairs after death? Rumor had it they continued to grow. Fingers and toenails as well. Mr. Rumor was wrong again. After death, our skin retracts, making it look like our hair and nails continue to grow. (source) But they don’t.
Hair growth after death was my #2 reason for cremation.
But what if forensic science is wrong?
Fortunately, my #1 reason still envelops.
I’ve seen the 1988 Dutch film, The Vanishing.
Hair-Raising.
