H is for HAIR

I should have known when I looked at my dad and his siblings, what the future would hold. There were four brothers and one sister and even though she had maintained her hair throughout her lifetime, all four boys had become folllicly challenged while still in their twenties. On dad's side this looked a straight one in five chance of keeping my curls but two factors weighed heavily against that probability. First, few women are bald and, secondly, science had taught me that every new birth is not entirely dependent on previous statistics. Yet I lived in hope. After all, my dad's father always had a full head of hair and although my mum's dad had been baldish for as long as I can remember, his sons, generally but not exclusively had kept their crowns. There was, however, one other factor in the mix, for one of my uncles who had not lost his hair had instead gone prematurely grey and was now completely white. So in the hair department, there was not much to look forward to. Not that it occurred to me anything more than fleetingly.

When I was young, dad used to take me to a barber in Moy. His name was Peter and before he would cut my hair, he placed a wooden board, covered in a fabric, across the arms of the chair, which then became my perch for the duration of the trim. Actually it was not so much a trim as a shave and I knew exactly what short back and sides meant. And although I didn't really care then, by the time I got to twelve or thirteen, on the edge of the hippie revolution and the advent of long-haired pop stars, I was less than impressed. Still, the ritual continued for a while longer until I was old enough to find a new barber who was less severe in his approach but dad continued to make the short journey to Peter even when there didn't seem to be anything to cut. By my mid to late teens, my head had recovered and taken on a mind of its own, with the strands now well over the collar and heading towards the shoulders, almost ready for a little bow. It prompted the headmaster at my school to comment that it was getting on the long side but he wouldn't tell me to get it cut. Knowing his genial relationship with his senior pupils, I realized this was as close to a reprimand as I was ever likely to get.

It was some time in my second year at Queens that the rot set in. I hadn't noticed anything myself, but while sitting in a library cubicle one night, I was alerted by a 'friend' passing by to a small, clearing developing in the centre of my crown. Closer examination confirmed his eagle eye and I knew there was little I could do but watch. However the process was slow and has not continued at any great speed through the intervening years and I take much comfort that my dad and his brothers were 'smooth' long before the age I have reached and I appear to still have some distance to travel. The white hair development was much more rapid. I first realized that something was amiss when I began to study the hairs gathering on the black gown that my barber fastened around me when cutting. More and more of it was no longer brown, but various shades of grey. That was about twelve years ago. Now I don't see any brown at all when I visit him and to deepen the misery, most of my former classmates have endured neither misfortune. A couple of years ago, I met an old friend, at least fifteen years my senior and marvelled silently at his full head of black hair. I'm sure he could have told me which bottle to buy but he was probably too embarrassed! Now I've nothing against hair dye at all, but I wonder what we would all look like if all the colouring agents that we use, suddenly stopped working. How many people would we not recognize?

For me, I love that verse in Proverbs which says, 'Grey hair is a crown of splendour; it is attained by a righteous life.' Hair was also an indication of Samson's strength in the Old Testament though his loss of power was more about his disobedience than some visible attribute. However the greatest indication of our worth to God and His interest in us is shown by Jesus as he sends out His twelve followers with these words, 'even the very hairs of your head are all numbered.' If God is interested enough in me to know at any exact moment, how many hairs I have, then He is interested in every aspect of my life. In truth, my hair colour or amount doesn't really matter for God looks beyond what others see. It's not hairstyle but lifestyle.