Just Plain Bill
No Greater Love…
Everyone had quieted down just after my mom blew out the
candles and just before she was cutting the cake during her 90th
birthday celebration when she announced her birthday wish: “My wish is for my son Bill to take all
the money I have left and - buy himself some hair.”
As one might imagine, that brought about quite a bit of
laughter, and more than just a little bit of embarrassment to me.
First, some history to put that audacious statement in
perspective: Ever since I began losing my hair in my late teens (starting with
the old term “widow’s peak”), my mom had been fixated on my hair - or lack of
it. My mom was also a very talented artist. She was trained as a “tintist”, one
who would hand-tint black and white photographs, a long lost skill, which
thrived before Kodak perfected color photography. My mom’s copy of my black and
white college graduation photograph included, in addition to coloring, a
hairline carefully colored into the picture, filling up the growing space in my
receding hairline.
Nowadays, we have the magic of
tools such as Photoshop that will take care of the task with a few moves of the
mouse and a few keystrokes. But that just wouldn’t be the same as my mom’s
unending effort to return her son’s full head of hair, something she imagined and
accomplished through her gift of those magical colored pens. It was an
expression of love only a mother could bestow.
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