Sometime around when I was 30 or so, I was passing a peaceful evening sitting in my easy chair, reading a book. Molly, being about her own business, happened to walk behind the chair I was sitting in. Suddenly she stopped, and gasped sharply.
“You’re going bald!” she exclaimed.
Well, I’d been noticing that the hair on the crown of my head had been feeling a tad ‘thinner’ in recent days, but I couldn’t see any such effects when I looked in the mirror. Molly very helpfully produced a second mirror so I could see that, indeed, there was a small circlet of bare skin peeking through on the crown of my head.
As I’ve gotten older, that ‘small circlet’ has grown a bit larger, until today it looks like this:
I like to say that this ‘tonsure’ is indicative of my ‘Latent Monastic Tendencies’. I’ve been known to invoke such tendencies in the pursuit of more solitude than is generally afforded by the presence of eight children in my family. But Molly only laughs derisively, and says, “I’ll give you eight kids’ worth of ‘Latent Monastic Tendencies’!” Something about how ‘eight kids’ and ‘monastic’ constitute some kind of oxymoron. . .
But I still can’t see it when I look in the mirror. . .
