Birthdays, for some reason, are opportunities for the people in your life to dig up old photographs of you and post them on social media. This is meant to be playful and affectionate — a gentle sort of reminder about how time passes and skin loosens, especially around the face and jaws — and mostly it’s fun to read the good wishes of the commenters. They’ll add something like, “You still got it!!!” or “What a hottie back then!!!” And it’s a nice little boost on what otherwise would be just another step closer to assisted living.
This year, on my birthday, I was faced with something more disturbing than photographic reminders that the reaper comes for all of us. I was struck, in a photograph from 1975 posted by my own mother, by the news that I once sported what can only be described as a “helmet of hair.” Sitting akimbo on my bike, in clothes that I would wear today — a white Izod alligator polo shirt and a pair of khaki pants — there is a beehive-shaped cone of hair sprouting out of my head. There is, in fact, as much hair above my forehead as there is face below it. I look like I’m wearing a dervish skullcap or some enormous brown bonnet. I am a freckle-faced boy in the eye of a hurricane of hair.
“They let you leave the house like that?” a friend commented on the post. “Seriously, though, what were you going for? Was that a ‘look’ back then?” added another.
I have no idea what, if anything, I was “going for.” I was 10 years old, so I probably wasn’t going for anything. My guess is that I just didn’t give much thought to my “look,” and no one else did either, apparently. My hair would just grow and grow in thick Celtic swirls that could never be shaped or tamed. I looked like a fool, sure, but in my defense so did a lot of people in 1975. And as I gazed through the decades at my 10-year-old self, all I could think was, “What I could do with that hair today, with all of the lotions and gels and creams we have now!”
For the record, I still have a pretty full head of hair. Oh, sure, there’s some thinning at the front. I show a bit more forehead at 59, but I’m not complaining. Instead, I’m marveling at the sheer vital energy of my younger self — the cauldron of restless life force and impatient fire that must have been going on inside me to push out all of that hair in such reckless and wild amounts. I mean, I know my parents made me get regular haircuts. But somehow those weren’t enough to stem the tide.
The good news is, in one of the photos from the late 1990s, I’m wearing an enormous pair of pants — high waist, pleats, wide legs, the whole look — that are now back in fashion. That took some of the sting out of the 1975 Hair Explosion.
Still, I sat for a while and looked at the photograph of me and The Hair and wondered where that energy and vitality went. Yesterday, for instance, I suddenly found myself panting and out of breath after popping out three ice cubes from their rubber freezer molds. This morning, standing up after a few minutes in a chair, I unthinkingly made the same groaning noises I remember my father making.
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We look at old pictures of ourselves and we may laugh at the bad fashions and ridiculous hairdos. But what we’re really seeing is what we looked like when we didn’t care how late it was when we ate a slice of pizza, or instinctively search for someplace to sit down the moment we enter a strange room, or care if it looked like we were wearing a fisherman’s sweater made out of hair on our heads.
I don’t want the hair back, honestly. What I want is the energy it took to grow it like that.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and he is the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
