Lack Thereof

 For years I have listened to the calming voice inside my head that says, "They're only children," when the discussion turns to my hair. Or lack thereof. 

More often than not, the questions are innocent enough. "Mister Caven, why don't you have hair?" I do the best I can to give them a direct and sincere answer, but the bottom line tends to fall in the "because I'm old" range. This can still leave a dangling thread, specifically "how old are you Mister Caven," but that is an answer that I have given up being coy about. My age is no longer a source of embarrassment for me, but rather a badge of honor. It couples nicely with the other time-related inquiry, "How long have you been teaching here?"

I used to leave it simply at "forever," but now I have no real difficulty letting my young charges know that I am approaching three full decades of service at Horace Mann Elementary. There are an increasing number of children who have parents whom I taught that can piece that puzzle together. The question for them becomes, "Did you have hair when you were my mom's teacher?"

The answer to that one is a qualified "yes." The pictures of me in my first years of teaching show off my rather shaggy mass of curls that neatly covered the back of my head, accompanied by a beard and mustache that tended to diminish the effects of the radically receding hairline at the top of my rapidly emerging forehead. The reality is that I showed up to work as a teacher going bald, and my years of service have done little or nothing to diminish that trend. 

So much so that some years back I switched from a once every three months scalp purge to keeping a clean-shaven dome at all times. Maintenance has become a matter of keeping hair off my head, rather than trying to find clever ways to diminish the aforementioned ravages of time. 

"Mister Caven is bald," isn't the putdown that many of my young charges feel that it should be, though it does tend to obscure my relative worth as an educator. If discussion has turned to my capacity to grow hair on the top of my head, things have slipped off the track of elementary education. Even a quick lesson on genetics would probably fail to satisfy the attempts of keeping things light since the common wisdom seems to be that you get your hair or lack thereof from your mother's side of the family, but my mother's father had a pretty nice head of hair before he passed on to the big drugstore in the sky at a relatively early age. 

So, when the kids start in calling me "Mister Clean," I tend to remind them that when I started this job, I had hair. Leaving some of them with the notion that when I am done with all of this teaching stuff, I will return to the Hair Club For Men. 

I'm not just a member, I'm one of the founders.