Bald Mountain

Lately, I have been preoccupied with thoughts of my father, who we lost about two and a half years ago.  He was a complex character; much like a Rubix cube, he had many sides and many colors.  He and I had a special bond because of our shared musicianship, but to most people he was simply bald.

Yes, bald.  The man’s hairline barely survived his twentieth year.  I never knew my father with a full head of hair, or even enough residual upper strands to affect a Trump-style combover.  He had a minimal fringe of curly hair around the perimeter, and a top you could buff to a spit shine.  To his credit, my father never admitted insecurity about his being “follicly-challenged.”  Indeed, he embraced his condition as a consummation devoutly to be wished.

On a scouting trip, the boys dubbed him “Bald Eagle.”  It stuck.  He wore this moniker like a badge of honor through the rest of his life, commonly using it himself to sign cards and emails.  An engineer-turned-sales-and-marketing-guy, my father knew the value of getting in front of an issue, raising the objection, and turning a weakness into an asset.   He became a zealot for hairlessness, shrugging off well-meaning suggestions that he try medical, surgical, and artificial approaches to combat or camouflage his  baldness.  He had no use for a solution as he did not perceive that he had a problem.

As I reached adulthood and entered the workforce, I was surprised to discover that many of my colleagues found their receding hairlines to be somewhat threatening to their manhood.   In our family, baldness was inevitable; my father celebrated his with such brashness and humor that I was raised blind to the sensitivities it created in most men.  Thus, my father’s head became a character all its own—a sort of court jester capable of providing comic relief in the most necessary moments.  Once, while I was being scolded harshly for some childhood indiscretion, I became distracted by a vein that stood up on my father’s head, causing me to break out laughing.  At first, my father was angry that I was not being appropriately contrite, but when I pointed at his head he broke out laughing too.  It was not only hysterical; it saved me from dire punishment.

My father’s head was also his Achilles’ heel.  He was an avid do-it-yourselfer, always trying to save a buck repairing everything from drippy plumbing to lose floor tiles.  He loved to disappear into the garage and emerge with an arsenal of wrenches, then crawl upside-down into some tight space to make repairs.  Mission accomplished, he would summon everyone to see what he had accomplished.  Invariably, just as we arrived, he would jump up with self-congratulations only to slam his head into a hard object, leaving a dramatic gash on his shiny head. There was something so humorously incongruous about an assault on his shining beacon.  Can you imagine the scene?  Our entire family is rolling on the floor laughing, while a nearly unconscious father is reeling, holding his bleeding head screaming, “It’s not funny!  It’s not funny!” 

I beg to disagree.

One day, my father left the barbeque open on the patio, intending to replace the cover the next day when it was cool.  When he came home from work on this particular day my mother warned him not to go out on the patio.  “There are killer mockingbirds,” she said, dead serious.  My father looked at her like she was crazy.  “Killer mockingbirds?” he teased.  “There’s no such thing as killer mockingbirds!”  “I’m warning you,” she repeated, “do not go out there.”  Dismissing her outright, he marched out to the patio to complete his chore.  Almost instantly, a crazed mockingbird swooped down from its perch and pecked my father on the top of his head, Hitchcock style.   He came running back into the house shocked and bleeding, only to find his family in uncontrollable fits of laughter.  Now that's funny!

It was a special thing to witness my father, a tough man of starched principles, incapacitated by his own folly.  He had a gift for being able to cry in pain and laugh at himself all at once.  His bald head remains to me a symbol of this man—able to brandish weakness as strength, able to laugh at himself.   He suffered many a barb about his bald head, but he always took it on the chin.

Tomorrow's blog:  Mommadods' Day Off