The great Poteat hair retreat

I used to think August was special because it contains my birthday. (Wednesday, Aug. 26. Send cash, checks, Venmo payments, baseball tickets, and small farm animals to 110 S. Sterling St., Morganton.)

Nope. The birthday of an elderly fella from Drexel is most definitely trumped by something called National Hair Loss Awareness Month.

According to a press release from a mysterious group called Press Data, loss of hair can affect confidence, well-being, and everyday life for those so afflicted — such as me.

Of course, those so afflicted, such as me, hardly need a special month to make us aware that once fertile fields have gone bare, that hairs have fallen like autumn leaves in October, that we are made fun of, ridiculed, and looked down upon by every full-head-of-hair simpleton in the nation.

An argument could be made that Dwight David Eisenhower, who was president when I emerged naked and screaming into this world, was the last truly great American chief executive.

When he was supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe, had Ike taken the time to wash, moisturize, blow dry, comb, and put styling gel on a full head of wavy curls, D-Day would have happened not on June 6, 1944, but on Dec. 27, 1953.

And, of course, Ike was president at the same time the infamous Nikita Khrushchev was the top dog of the Soviet Union. Like Ike, Kruschchev had not a hair on his head. Don’t tell me that didn’t provide an instant bond between the two.

Since then, it’s been one fully furred chief executive after another. Even at age 97, on the day he left office, when he remembered neither who he was nor what he had done, Ronald Reagan still had a full head of dark, luxurious hair.

Had I known anything about genetics and the science of male pattern baldness, I would have known at an early age that I was doomed.

The baldness gene comes primarily from the mother’s side of the family. Pat and Bea Poteat had three sons, the older two of whom were spitting images of our dad while young Billy looked just like his mom.

My mother had six brothers — my maternal uncles — and not one of them made it to age 50 with a full head of hair. Foolishly unaware of how my future stood baldly before me, I thought the exceptionally thick hair of my childhood would linger forever.

And indeed, it did … until the ripe old age of 16.

I still recall the May afternoon in the spring of 1972, bored and distracted in Mr. Hemphill’s chemistry class, when I passed my right hand across my forehead and sickeningly realized that the bare space there was expanding.

That’s how it began. A slow but inexorable retreat across the entire western front. Later, around the time my first daughter was born, a second front was opened, and a small, hairless circle began to form on the back of my head.

A Christmas photo from 1983, developed and printed by Jack Rabbit, showed me from behind, kneeling in front of daughter Caroline, who was perched on a chair. The circle was not only visible, it caught the overhead light and was blindingly bright.

Thus does a man learn, at age 28, that both his hair and his youth are but fleeting things, destined to leave him all too soon.

Through my 30s, I kept up the facade.

I carried a comb in my back pants pocket. I actually put it to use a couple of times a day. When I sat in Tommy Sain’s chair I asked for the “gentleman’s trim.”

By the time the summer of 1997 arrived, at age 42, I had to face facts.

I was growing more and more bald.

I was not going to be a “comb over” guy. Nothing looks more pathetic than combing a few ridiculously long strands of hair from one side of the head to the other, feebly trying to hide a vast desert in between.

Ditto for being a hairpiece guy. Those birdnests, even the expensive ones, can be spotted across a crowded football stadium.

Instead, I walked into Sain’s Barber and Style, planted myself in Tom’s chair, and said, “Tommy, give me the buzz.”

No more combs. No more fakery. Just complete acceptance of the raw and forceful masculinity denoted by a hairless head.

And you know what? It turned out to be liberating.

For nearly 30 years, I had worried about something I could not control. I had combed it, trimmed it, fretted over it, tried to disguise it, all the while watching it disappear, strand by strand.

But once I finally gave up the fight, I discovered that there was something wonderfully uncomplicated about being bald.

There is no bad hair day. No need for a comb. No need to wonder whether the wind is messing up my hair. No need to spend 20 minutes in front of a mirror trying to make three remaining hairs look like 30.

And so, as we festively celebrate National Hair Loss Awareness Month, I have reached a conclusion: Maybe losing my hair wasn’t a tragedy after all. Maybe it was simply one more gift of getting older — a reminder that some things are better accepted than resisted.

Besides, August does have my birthday.

And now I know it has National Hair Loss Awareness Month, too.

Frankly, I think that makes it the greatest month of the year.

And you can still send all those wonderful presents to the above address.