Balding Gracefully

At first you don't want to admit that its happening to you but somewhere around eighteen or nineteen years old you keep taking showers and noticing that after shampooing your hair, there's always about five to ten hairs in your hand. Sometimes after a shower you have to reach down and pull a clot of your own hair out of the drain so that the water will go down. You can try to ignore it because there's so much on your head that you don't see any effect. I dyed my hair jet black in college-twice-and after both dye jobs I lost an awful lot of hair. I reasoned at the time that the chemicals in the dye must have fried my hair at the roots and thus, it would continue to fall out until replaced by new hair. Eventually a discernible pattern does emerge, however. You don't remembering having a widow's peak but suddenly the hair above your temples begins receding in ever more incisive triangles, leaving a comical salient of hair up front. Still, this you can rationalize. Your friends all tell you that every man's hairline recedes to some degree from what it was when that man was a child. Then the dreaded day arrives-the day on which you can no longer ignore the problem. Like a volcanic island emerging from the murky depths, the scalp on the top of your head is suddenly visible. You stand with a hand mirror looking at the back of your head reflected in the bathroom mirror. Suddenly, like a nervous habit you start fingering the hair on the back of your head and carefully making sure that any emerging bald spot is covered by a cow-lick.