Old Hair

Other than senior discounts and Medicare, one enormous perk of aging is the lack of hairy legs.

Oh, I do occasionally – about once every three or four months – have to harvest the meager crop, scattered sparsely on legs whose veins tend to make them look like maps of the London subway system.

Still. It’s a perk.

Hair is a contrary mammalian trait. It seems to grow where we don’t want it and disappear from places where it is fervently desired.

This is true for both men and women but I will deal only with the aging female here. [And I will not deal with all of the capillary ramifications – like moustaches (which is another dilemma altogether).]

When I was younger and more smug (smugness seems to be characteristic of youth) I would smirk disparagingly at men who had attempted to disguise a balding pate by combing longer locks over barren skulls.

No longer.

My once glorious tresses still exist but, like the earth’s aquifer, are diminished.

My hair is thinning.

From the front and the sides, I still look adequately ‘haired’. Not so much from the back.

Now I too must fluff the remains and try to guide them over my pink, pink scalp.

I even have some powder I can sprinkle over the too obvious hair barrenness. It helps.

So beware, oh youth. Avoid smugness and smirks. All too soon, that which you deride will be that with which you must contend.