No Greatness, No Transcendence

Okay, I'm tired of greatness and transcendence. I yearn for something simple, something everyday, something so firmly rooted in reality it can't be misconstrued for anything else. That fundamental thing I am thinking about a lot lately is hair and how quickly I am losing mine. People used to say to me, "you have such a thick head of hair, you'll never go bald." But they were wrong, tragically and glaringly wrong. Here I am approaching 60 and the hair at the front of my head and extending back at least four inches is thinning at an alarming rate. Oh, sure, at this point I can hide that loss of hair with a strategic combing or two, but the truth must be faced openly and courageously. In the next two to three years, I will have only thin slivers of hair covering the top of the my head and even those will eventually vanish, leaving my pate hopelessly exposed. And once my hair goes, all the world will see me for what I am, an aging man suffering from a severe case of loss - of hair, of wit, of knowledge, of the ability to remember not just a few names, but all names. I will end up bereft of everything, save recollection of only the lifetime batting averages of baseball players from the 1930s and 1940s. There I'll be, all alone, scrunched down in a tiny, unlit corner repeating those averages over and over again: .325, .367, .344, .333, .358...