I normally hate bringing up the subject of baldness on Father’s Day, but it seems to me precisely the occasion for coming to terms with an unpleasant forced inheritance.
The genetic condition once thought exclusively for men had, in my case, crossed genders. If only for that, how can I forget Dad? (I also got his legs, but they aren’t so bad).
Last resort
Anyway, what else to do but search for solutions, but not a transplant, as was Dad’s own last resort. I found Rogaine for Women before I went broke from expensive treatments with similar, if slightly better results. Like Dad, I refused to surrender to genes and fate, unlike my uncles, his brothers.
“Like a thief in the night,” says Uncle Quitos, describing his own case. As he likes to tell his story, he wakes up one morning and there’s more hair on his pillow than on his head. He was only 28. Luckily, like all my equally cursed uncles, he was handsome enough to more than make up for his baldness.
They took it all in good humor and, being imaginative storytellers, each of them made his own case of baldness an interesting story, especially how he coped with it. At Sunday table at our paternal grandparents’ home, where I, cousin Ninit and Sylvia lived until high school, we were ourselves rapt listeners to their hilarious tales.
Their father, Lolo Rafael, the genetic precedent, would himself listen in silent amusement. He didn’t have his own story to tell about his case; enough that he knew, he said, that the only thing that stopped falling hair was the floor.
Hair transplant
Dad’s thinning hair hung on longer than any of his brothers, but he was not one to let things alone. He had a plan. I was already married, a mom of four in fact, when Dad, known to faint after a tooth extraction, asked me, leaving me momentarily shocked, to bring him to my dermatologist friend for a hair transplant.
He appeared at Sunday lunch sporting his new look. Everyone certainly noticed, but none of his brothers envied him; they all dreaded too much any kind of surgery to even consider following suit. Dad himself stopped after the first stage of the three-stage process. He was content enough to be the least bald of the brothers.
God’s sense of humor
Too soon all the hair he had added had turned white, suddenly, giving him another problem. A disastrous first hair-dyeing attempt, with my own Clairol, turned his white hair pink. He liked to say, toward the latter part of his 91 years, “If anyone has doubts God has a sense of humor, try aging.”
That was Dad, always laughing irreverently at life and himself.
Before the transplant, he and my younger brother had worn identical wigs, possibly a buy-one-take-one deal. It took all of Mom’s and my own self-control to not laugh in their presence. Pictures of them in that era still crack me up.
Dad later confessed he had thrown his wig away at the nearest garbage bin after it had been rained on; the synthetic hair turned Afro-kinky on him. That was when he decided on the transplant.
Transplants have gone a long way, as have wigs. But Dad’s wig, in no way, looked like Frank Sinatra’s, which, according to tabloids, he could shower in; but neither did it look as bad as the most disturbing wig in the Philippine political scene today.
Most infamous
Is it the wig or is it the man?
I can just imagine how Dad, a lawyer and a newspaper columnist himself before he became a politician, would be writing in these times. He had written a daily column of political satire in The Manila Times but stopped, for obvious ethical reasons, once elected to a congressional seat, for a district in Manila.
Martial law abolished Congress and put him under house arrest but once the dictatorship decidedly lost support and was forced to ease up, he resumed writing a column, for Joe Burgos’s Malaya.
Oh, what he could have done with Vitaliano Aguirre, the nation’s most infamous wig wearer!
Lately, he has been getting in my own hair, as possibly that of the rest of the nation. But with his high official perch, one snicker, I imagine, can be disastrous.
A baldhead Aguirre, I would think, should be only proper; he is, after all, the justice secretary, expected to be more transparent, forthcoming without the sparsest cover.
Anyway, Happy Father’s Day to all—hair-transplanted, wigged, bald or silver-haired!