Time heals all wounds, leaves a little scar, and eventually you're all scar.
This is a birthday post.
Happy birthday.
You know who you are.
What do you think of when you think of a bald Grape?
Hopefully you don't think "Aren't all grapes sort of bald? Who wants wine made from hairy grapes!!!"
Hopefully, as a passionate reader of clerkmanifesto, one who keeps charts and scores and spreadsheets, you instead think:
"Grape: Noted friend of clerkmanifesto, with a nickname of "Grape", he must have shaved his head at some point."
He did!
And since on his birthday we reminisce in one way or another about him (with a weird miss on that tradition in the crazy year of 2016, it haunts us to this day), we are surely going to be discussing something to do with his bald head.
We are!
I wasn't there when he shaved his head. But I will make this instructive preliminary point to any younger readers:
People did not commonly shave their heads around the early 1980's. So when Grape shaved his head it not only had an ahead-of-his-time quality, also his father was very upset.
Or so I heard.
I wasn't there when Grape's father allegedly got upset that he shaved his head.
But immediately after it all happened Grape and I went backpacking in Yosemite. There was a valley of granite there, carved into fabulous swirling potholes by running water high in the wilderness. We lay on a rock by the kind of idyllic stream I'm always trying to fake in my pictures these days, and Grape, with no hair on his head, told me all about the baldness.
I remember every word of that conversation!
No, just kidding.
All I remember is what, based on that conversation, I thought. I thought Grape's mom was upset that Grape shaved his head. And her way to express it was by saying she was mad that Grape would make his father so upset with his shaved head.
Personally I think Grape's father was fine with Grape's shaved head.
But who knows?
Does Grape know?
He might. But it's not important now.
It was forty years ago.
His hair grew back.
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