You're a Hairy, Wizard.

Things are not…

Things are…

Sigh.

So yesterday I got my hair cut.

Background:  When I was 22 I went to a barber who could not speak English well.  She had barely said three words I could understand until and they were these: “You go bald.”  At this point she had been cutting my hair for about ten minutes, so I was confused as to why she suddenly thought I was going bald.  At first I thought she had clipped a tuft of hair too short, but no.  She was rooting around in my roots as though she was a hair pathologist and she said it again.  “You go bald!”

This is not something that I think warrants a building wide proclamation.  I tried to quiet her down by assuring her that my “part” in the back had always been larger than normal.  I said it in a tone that I thought was appropriate for two strangers sharing the temporarily intimate relationship of barber to barbed.  I was hoping she would match my volume.

“No!  You go bald!”

“I’m not going bald,” I said, slightly louder.  But I was.  When I saw my wedding pictures after we returned from our honeymoon I realized two things that depressed the crap out of me.  I was 40 pounds over-weight and I was definitely (going) bald.  No fair.  23 years old.

There were signs.  Genetically, I mean.  They say men inherit their hair from their mothers, but that is bull shit.  My mother has a lion’s mane.  One of my uncles on her side is going bald, but he’s in his sixties.  So I reject that pseudo-science.  My father, however, has wispy thin hair.  You know that hair that babies are born with?  That’s what my father has.  My grandmother’s was even thinner.  That said, my father still has all of his, wispy or not.  His is also not gray.

When I was one and twenty,
I heard a wise man say,
Grow your beard out, it will look cool,
And hippie chicks will think you’re totes rad.

(I changed some of the words to that A. E. Housman poem, but I'm pretty sure this is gist of it.)

At 21 I grew my beard out.  It was a deep red with a blonde mustache.  No lie.  When I was thirty I grew it out again and found that all of that autumn color had turned an early winter.  Also my sideburns were showing some gray, which was fine because I kept them cut pretty short.  A Gray-beard at 30.

Which brings us to yesterday.  I’m getting my hair cut and the barber is using the electric razor to cut the sides really short.  Then it happened.  I don’t know whence the tuft of hair came – except that it wasn’t from the bald spot on the back of my head – but a small tuft of white-WHITE hair fell into my lap.  Then another.  My early winter is turning into a deep winter snow! 

I’m apparently a wizard.  I just didn’t know it until now.  I need to get a pointy hat.