make my hair piece

Making my hair-peace

By Wally Nichols
(203) 858 3634
cwn4@aol.com

Buying my first baseball cap recently seemed like defeat. Neither a big sports fan, nor fan of advertising someone else’s team for free, I was driven into the arms of a ball cap vendor reluctantly, one might even say genetically. What grown man stands in line next to teenagers to buy his first cap? A bald or balding one who finally realized that winter is cold without hair, is who.

I’m asked what team’s cap I want. I am unable to supply an earnest answer. “I guess it has to be a baseball team, right? They are the ones who wear baseball caps?” The store owner chuckles at my logic, though possibly he’s just targeting my ignorance. I would immediately fail a trivia quiz on baseball teams.
“Not necessarily,” he offers. “You’ve got your football teams, hockey teams and even basketball teams.”
I’d fail a trivia quiz on those teams too.
“This cap for your son?” he asks.
“Nope”, I reply and point to the shiny top of my frozen head.
My options for team affiliation are wide open. I’m lower than a fair weather fan. I’m working on logos only.
“Well, what ever you want,” he says fussing with nearby inventory. “Just make your mind up soon—I’ve got customers.” He means real sports fans.
I survey the options like a kid in a candy store, but a kid in a candy store that has been surreptitiously filled in the middle of the night with bitter root vegetables. I read the team names stitched in bright thread on the caps that blanket the stores’ entire wall.
Giants. Not feeling like much of a giant today.
Cowboys. Maybe I should hide under a ten gallon job…
Red Sox. Don’t even like wearing socks let alone red ones.
The Bears. Nope. Bears are hirsute and I’m a little sensitive.
The Heat. I can’t be the poster boy for an inanimate object. Doesn’t a team need horns or hooves or the ability to soar or something sharp to gore with for a logo?

Caps are the last bastion of the folicly challenged, though as I was recently reminded by a kindly old lady as she gleefully twisted my cheek with her Eastern bloc fingers that, ‘grass doesn’t grow on a busy street.’ Caps become the sanctuary of the receding hairline. And yes, caps are a place to casually hide. Knock a baseball cap off of an adult stranger in the street and the chances are , they are bald. Or well on their way. Beneath a baseball cap, fantasy reigns. For all anyone knows, under the cap could lurk a Fabio or a Yule Brenner.

Or a Fabio!

It’s a crapshoot. That is the beauty and power of a cover-up, whether it take the form of a cap, or a baggy jogging suit. What lies beneath is entirely up to the imagination of others. I shouldn’t care but I do…The cap is less a tool for the vain right now than it is a tool for the cold. We lose 85% of our body heat through our heads and New York exacts its convection toll as cruelly as anyplace. So mostly on those legitimate grounds I am at the counter of this sports shop. Keeping my body warm. Self preserving. But there is also the Fabio factor which I can’t shake. I can’t be almost 50. There must be some mistake.

It is a milestone, this middle-age business. One day one wakes up and realizes that no amount of creative combing or camera angles will restore what has been wrongfully taken. And attempts to deny that reality are attempts to deny to passage of time or the strength of body chemistry. But I love my hair and am loathe to think it doesn’t love me back, at least enough to stick around a bit longer. Haven’t I been a good steward? Haven’t I washed, rinsed and repeated enough, if necessary, as necessary?

The line at the counter is not getting any shorter, thought the temper of the shop keeper is. Finally I spot my cap. Way up high. Calling out for me. It is perfect for its stark truthfulness and chronological accuracy. I see my age in it and point at the cap that represents so many of us sooner or later. Or now. Not quite middle age but decidedly past youth…

“This us?” the shop keeper asks, politely lowering himself into my drama as he reaches up and dusts off a cap that no one around here cares about.
“Yup, I say, “That’s us--the 49-ers. I’ll take it!”