Snow On The Roof

It was a seasonal thing. I shaved my head on the summer solstice at the suggestion of a friend who had taken note of my challenged hairline. "Why not?" Was the motivation. The timing was more about having a few months to grow hair back on the places where it would grow than the position of the sun in the sky. If it turned out that my skull had some horrible deformity that would best be hidden by patches of fur. A hat would have been an option too, but certain occasions require more formal attire than my standard array of baseball caps. It turned out that I needn't have worried. Or my friends and family were all so very polite that they could not bring themselves to comment on just how awful my shaved head looked.
If that last bit were true, they have all kindly held their tongues for the past decade or so. What began as a twice a year celebration of hairlessness, occurring on the longest and shortest days of the year, evolved into a seasonal observance by putting the equinoxes into the mix. This last move was made to limit the clown hair that would assert itself on the sides and back of my head near the end of six months. Three months kept me much less clown-like. It also kept the obvious signs of my advancing years at bay by simply cutting off all those offending gray hairs.
This past year I have been much less rigid about the timing of my shearing. I have still made a point of being clean shaven on the twenty-first day of March, June, September, and December. This summer I found it was easier to just keep the razor moving when I was shaving my chin and upper lip. I found it to be less of a core to keep going up the side of my head and over the top. The time it takes me to cut all those whiskers off turns out to be not considerably more than the time it used to take to lather, rinse and repeat. The shampoo concession in my house has dropped off by a third. More or less.
Now I sense the close of the year coming, and when I look at the calendar I find myself wondering just how I will be marking the beginning of winter. There was a time when I used to give my holiday party guests a turn with the electric razor, making a game of cutting swaths through my balding pate. We will now have to resort to more traditional games and activities. My eyebrows are getting a little bushy.