There's a Photograph of My Father at the Age I Am Now

There is a photograph of my father standing in front of a car he was proud of, taken at roughly the age I am now, and the thing I notice in it these days is his hairline. Not because it was bad. Because it was the beginning of mine.

I didn't expect to inherit the sequence quite so faithfully. The temples first, in the late thirties, the way the light goes in autumn, a little earlier each evening until you can't quite remember when it was ever fully bright. Then the crown, which is the unkind one, because you can't see it yourself and so you learn about it secondhand, from a photograph someone took with affection that you then find you can't bring yourself to look at twice.

What caught me off guard was never really the hair itself. It was how much of myself I quietly rearranged around it, and how firmly I insisted, to everyone including me, that I was doing no such thing.

I became the man who offers to take the picture. A generous instinct, I told the room, and myself. There was a cap that lived in the car, and I'd have sworn under oath it was about the sun, right up until I noticed I reached for it walking into bright rooms where there was no sun at all, where there was nothing overhead but a fluorescent tube and my own vanity. I developed preferences about where I sat at dinner that I never once examined. I learned, without deciding to, the exact angle to hold my head so that a low light wouldn't find the top of it. None of this felt like a decision. It felt like weather. It simply arrived, and I adjusted, and the adjusting became so habitual that I stopped registering it as anything other than the ordinary shape of a day.

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These are the kinds of photos men were comparing at home.

No studio shoot, no perfect lighting. Just the awkward camera angles men actually use when they are trying to decide if anything changed.

Here is the part that is genuinely difficult to say, and the reason I think men so rarely say it. A man is permitted almost no vanity about his appearance, and absolutely none about his hair, which he is expected to surrender somewhere around forty with a rueful joke and a good attitude. So the feeling has nowhere to go. You are not allowed to mind, and so you mind in secret, and the secret place it lives is that half-second in front of a shop window when your reflection arrives a beat before you've arranged your face, and you catch, plainly, a man who looks older than the one you still believe yourself to be on the inside. That gap, between the age you feel and the age the glass insists upon, is the actual injury. The hair is only where it becomes visible.

My wife said something once, not unkindly, late, the two of us getting ready for bed. She said, "you used to like having your picture taken." She wasn't making a point or starting anything. She had simply noticed, the way she notices everything, that I had slowly and thoroughly removed myself from the visual record of our own life together. There are whole years of us, of the kids, of holidays and ordinary Tuesdays, in which I do not appear, because I was always the one holding the phone. She'd seen it long before I had the nerve to. I didn't have a single thing to say in reply. I lay there in the dark holding it, the way you hold a true thing you'd been successfully avoiding.

I want to be honest that I did not come to what followed with any dignity. I did not sit down and resolve to make peace with ageing, or to interrogate my relationship with my own image. I did what men do. I bought something, quietly, almost furtively, with the vague unspoken hope that a problem might be handled before it ever had to be discussed out loud with another human being. It is a topical, from a company called Nordic Biolabs, a small and unremarkable thing you work into your scalp in the morning, and the only reason I let myself try it without an avalanche of self-conscious eye-rolling was that there was a money-back guarantee, several months of one, which made the whole faintly embarrassing experiment feel cheap enough to risk. If it did nothing, I would lose a little time and no money, and no one need ever know I had hoped for anything.

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I'm not going to hand you a transformation, because that isn't really the genre of my life, and because the change, when it eventually came, was not the kind you can photograph cleanly and caption. It arrived slowly and modestly, and I experienced most of it as an absence rather than an event. I noticed that I had stopped performing the small calculations. I wasn't choosing the seat. I wasn't clocking the lighting on the way through a door. The cap stayed in the car for weeks at a stretch and I forgot to resent it. Somewhere in there, my wife put her hand on the top of my head one evening and said there was new growth coming in at the front, and I went and confirmed it in the bathroom mirror with the undignified focus of a teenager, and there it was, faint and real.

One afternoon near the end of the summer, my son took a picture of me at the grill with the sun directly overhead, the precise conditions I had spent years building my life to avoid. And I looked at it, and I felt nothing in particular, which, after all that avoidance, was its own quiet and unexpected event. I didn't delete it. I kept it. That is the entire drama, and I'm aware of how small it sounds, and I am telling you anyway because it did not feel small.

What actually changed, if I am honest with myself, was less about hair than about the performance. I had been keeping up an elaborate, exhausting show of not caring for the better part of a decade, and it turns out the performance was far heavier than the caring had ever been. Putting it down was the relief. The hair was just the thing that finally let me.

I think about my father's photograph differently now. For a long time I read it as a forecast, the opening frame of a film whose ending I already knew. Lately I read it as just a man, standing in front of a car he liked, on what was probably a good day, with no notion that his son would be standing here decades later reading his hairline like tea leaves. He didn't have many options, my father. It turns out I have rather more than I assumed, which is, when you sit quietly with it, a strange and not unwelcome thing to discover about your own moment in the sequence.

I'm not going to tell you to do anything. That isn't this kind of essay, and you've been told what to do about your hair by enough people with something to sell. I'll only say that if you recognised yourself somewhere back there, in the seat or the cap or the photographs you're quietly absent from, it may be worth finding out whether your own situation is as settled as you've decided it is. Mine wasn't. The guarantee meant the finding-out cost me almost nothing but the admission that I'd been hoping all along.

Mentioned in this report

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