SLICE OF LIFE

Yes, my son, seeing you stand so long in front of the bathroom mirror devoting your entire life to your hair recalls to me when I too was fifteen years of age with an entire life to give to my hair, hair a lot darker and more crowded than it is now, and stood in front of the mirror every ten minutes or so to check my DA, greased beyond the physically possible with that scented pomade whose name I've long forgotten that meant life itself to me, as did the back-pocket rat-tail comb, haven't seen one of those in decades, my then-unjaded eyes staring deeply into what I hoped was the future, trying to get a glimpse, trying to become... to become what, I'm not sure, even forty years later, but whatever it was I don't think I became it, at least I hope not, but back then I wanted to become I guess anything other than what I was, what I had; I wanted different hair, different face, different body, different personality, different life, different city, just everything different, if possible (and forty years later it's all come true, though not in one instance the way I wanted at the time), which natural adolescent hormonally molten want was only just then beginning to be exacerbated exponentially by the media explosion, and suddenly there were so many ideals to emulate, and all in commercial perfection, making it harder than ever to be a teenager because to begin with when you're a teenager you have nothing and are no one yet, you haven't really arrived, you're still forming but right at the stage when you need some kind of ideal that you used to be able to find in your family, or in your village, but suddenly how could fathers or mothers or neighbors compete with two-dimensional James Deans and Elvis Presleys all over the place? Which made for practically insurmountable self-contrast, but then you grew up and noted some years later that the guy who used to have the perfect hair was now stone bald and a lot shorter than you recall, and having trouble with his joints, and you realized that what you had was not so bad after all, and that anyway what a very, very thin slice of life is there in the mirror, especially on top. Always remember that, son.