davesdigs by davesdigs

I am attending the fiftieth reunion of my high school graduating class of 1939 at the Northfield, Minnesota Country Club. The host committee is making awards. The award for the class member who traveled the greatest distance goes to Dave McGuire of Auburn, California. He wins the door prize--a real, hollow core bedroom door provided by classmate Paul Kump of Kump Lumber Company. It stays in Northfield.

I bet you can guess my award. The baldest. My prize: A GIANT COMB. I vow that if I ever win another huge comb for having a bald head, I will smash it into smithereens on the spot and sprinkle the teeth on the dinner plates of all those sitting at the head table. I’m serious.

“Oh, you look just like the guy on ‘Everyone Loves Raymond,’” thecorpulent lady in the Leisure World Fitness Center exclaims. Yeah, right. Just like bald Peter Boyle, the ugly schmuck. I never watch this stupid, award winning TV sit-com.

I experience premature baldness at the sadistic hands of my father’s brother Chuck and my playful grandfather Charles Webster Blodgett. They give me a fee haircut when I am six years old and at their mercy. Ultimately, all my locks lie on the grass. I am hairless.

With my shaved head I am the centerpiece of the five Blodgett children being captured in the lens of an itinerant photographer to enter into the Grand Theater’s contest to select the best looking family of children in town. All photos are projected daily on the town’s only movie screen. Here I am--the sad sack with shirttails out, pigeon toes in and the target of spontaneous ridicule and laughter by the entire community. Not the high point in my life.

We are not winners, although my three older sisters, Mary, Jeanne and Elaine in their neat dresses and pleasant smiles and my little brother Fritz in his smoothly combed locks and sailor suit are adorable.

Here are three historical portraits of the real me. The first is my official high school graduation photo. “Why aren’t you smiling?” someone asks. Obviously, she is not of my generation. In l939, smiling faces of high school graduates are inappropriate. We are to look serious, pensive.

Now you know why all the girls are on the chase after this 18-year old with his full head of wavy hair and long eyelashes. In the middle is me at thirty-six flanked by Old Baldy at eighty. Three different people--spring, summer and fall--“The September Song.”

Although I accept my dandruff-free state, what bothers me is the unfair pricing practice in barbershops. My few strands grow as fast as yours, but a haircut for me--including eyebrows and ears--is a two-minute operation and costs me the same as the guy in the next chair who wants a little more cut here and there and warms the chair for twenty minutes. So,I bought a $10 kit set at 1/8" and do my own.

On these cold, wintry nights I lose all my body heat through my chimney head unless I wear my trusty nightcap.

Hair. Billions of dollars spent each year on dead keratin. Hair and how we wear it have deep historical, social and cultural significance. Long-haired hippies. Hairless, heartless and lice-free skinheads. Peroxide blonds, henna redheads and sculptured Mohawks. Braids, cornrows, knots, headbands and buns. Bangs,wigs and marcelled waves. Permanents and pixie cuts. Find a good hairdresser and hang on to her for dear life. Bond with her or him. Once you find a compatible and competent coiffeuse, never let her go. Hair is a damn nuisance and a bottomless financial sinkhole.

Thank goodness I’m bald. As Kurt Vonnegut Jr. says, “So it goes.” And it does, and I reply, I’m glad it went. As a Pisces, I’m just not comfortable in the age of Aquarius with all that hair.