The Trials and Tribulations of a Bald Man

The indignities of being bald arrive early and stay late.  

One afternoon in college, in the early ‘80s, I ran into Randy, a clueless preppy jackass who studied in my department. We chatted a minute on the sidewalk, clad in our backpacks and down vests. Just as the conversation ended and we were about to each head our own way, Randy stared at my forehead, puzzled, and suddenly spat, “Oh my God, Dude, you’re going bald.”

Thanks Randy. Did I mention he was a jackass?

As the next decade wore on, I proceeded to truly go bald. It was all for the best I guess. When I had a full head of hair it wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do anyway. The feathered bangs of the late 1970s wouldn't quite feather. I spent so much time in front of a mirror with a circular brush and a blow dryer trying to make those bangs obey, when it started falling out, I suspected it was leaving to escape the abuse.

The unruly bangs, circa 1976: How is it fair that I 

have a unibrow AND and receding hairline?

There were some positive signs early on, signs that maybe hair was over-rated. On a flight to Phoenix with my sister, Cindy in those early receding hairline days, a cute young flight attendant gave me way more than normal attention, frequently stopping and chatting. When the young gal wondered off to fill someone’s coffee, Cindy leaned across the aisle and gave me her dry, familiar, dismissive smirk, gesturing toward her forehead, “Must be a father-figure thing.”

“What do ya mean?”

“The receding hairline,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “You must remind her of her father.”

Thanks, Sis. 

When I was a high school teacher, boys tried to put me on the defensive with cracks about being bald. In front of the entire class, one would raise his hand and ask, “ Does being bald ever get you down?” Other kids snickered

I’d respond with, “Yeah. Sometimes. But then I meet somebody with an embarrassing haircut like yours and I don’t feel so bad.”

Score one for the bald guy.

A bald high school teacher can riff on that theme all day. Another kid grabbed his thick, long hair by the roots and shook it for me. “You ever wish you had full head of hair like this?

“What? And look like you?”

Oddly, this kind of verbal sparing built warm and trust between me and my students. They somehow liked me more for giving it back to them.

The Hair Club for Men commercials of the 1990s didn’t improve bald man self-esteem as promised. Somewhere between the clips of formerly bald men running their fingers through new hair as thick as 1970s shag carpet was a clip of a busty blonde in a bikini chirping, “I don’t know why, I just like guys with hair.”

Thanks, Hair Club.

As I lost more and more hair, I tried to accept it by cutting what was left shorter and shorter. Embrace it, I thought.

When I was a teacher I had a principal who did just the opposite – he wore a toupee. But it was clear he was self conscious about it, as well he should have been. It was a damn ugly, ill-fitting hunk of hair. When we talked, he’d stare at my receding hairline. I’m sure he was trying to imagine how he would look without the rug. It helped me understand how women feel when men stare at their breasts in conversation. I wanted to draw a downward arrow on my forehead and write, “My eyes are down here.”

Once you get a toupee, I figure you’re kinda trapped, and he was. But cruel reality intervened for my old principal. He fought cancer and of course the chemo gave him little choice but to throw the toupee away. After surviving that terrible journey he never wore it again.

Fellow bald man, Dave Kimmel, a North Elementary 4th grade teacher gets the same kind abuse the rest of us bald men get. At a family reunion a curious, confused child squinted up at him, asking, "What's wrong with your skin?"

"What to you mean?” he asked. The little girl leaned closer and whispered gravely, “It’s all over your head.”

Out of the mouths of babes.

I myself joke about being bald as an act of self-deprecation. On humid or rainy days, I tell people, “I hate days like this. I spend all morning getting my hair just like I want it and then it rains.” But when I’m teased by somebody about being bald, I usually say something like, “I’ve as much control over this as a person in a wheel chair has over their handicap. Do you make fun of people in wheelchairs?”

I admit, that's a bit heavy handed, but it shuts them up. I’m just trying to turn the tables and perhaps don’t know my own strength. While it’s true both bald and handicap people can’t control their condition, handicap people have real obstacles to overcome while we bald men have only wounded vanity.

Some men overcome their wounded vanity with grace. I find myself envying men who look good in hats. Anytime I try to cover my bald head with a hat I look like I’m going to a costume party as . . . well, somebody who looks stupid in a hat.

How’s that for diminished expectations? I’ve quit envying men with hair and started envying men who look good in hats.

Buy Kurt's latest novel, The Salvage Man

“Kurt Meyer’s The Salvage Man is a gentle Midwestern fantasy made up of one treasure after another. Part historical fiction, part love story, and part rumination on modern day life, this novel asks hard questions about the world we live in and the world we leave behind. I couldn’t put it down.”

Larry D. Sweazy, author of A Thousand Falling Crows

Buy Kurt's first novel, Noblesville

“Meyer turns the pages of history with gentle care and a warm heart, creating a story I’ll remember forever. Thank you Kurt Meyer for opening a door to my beloved town’s past and allowing me to travel the streets and meet the people of Noblesville 1893.”

Susan Crandall, Author of Whistling Past the Graveyard

The Ghosts & Vibes of Old Houses

Flowers explode atop a rainbow of geometric patterns, the rainbow itself 

buoyed by a fountain of flowers. A door knob cast in brass - grabbed and 

turned by thousands of hands, tens of thousands of times. 1890s hardware

 taught me that Peter Max's psychedelic art of the 1960s was not so original.

In Wallace Stegner’s novel, Angle Of Repose, the elderly, cranky, handicapped protagonist is writing a book about his grandmother’s life in America’s late-Victorian era.

Sitting in her old house he speaks out loud to his long dead grandmother: “There is a physical law that teases me: The Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you–a train, or the future–has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But [grandmother] I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you. I would like to hear it as it sounded while it was passing.”

People think preservationists are trying to save beautiful, old things. That’s simplistic. I think we’re reacting to America’s amnesiac culture, and like Stegner’s protagonist, we’re trying to hear the sound of the past and hold it close.

It’s said that the past is a foreign country. I feel a yearning to connect with the lost language and customs of that foreign country. Just one example: the lives of my great uncle Chalk and great aunt Ruby who lived in northern Indiana along the Tippecanoe river. It’s a foreign country I see through the veil of childhood memories.

Their home was from a long gone era. Born in the 1890s and children of Victorian-era parents, they were living a little like their parent’s generation. In a simple house at the edge of Talma their living room was sequestered like a Victorian front parlor –dark, shades pulled when not in use. I’d sneak through the heavy drapery that hid it from the dining room to steal chocolate non-parriels from a cut glass bowl. There was a primitive kitchen with a big cast-iron sink, free-standing cabinets, and a well-used root cellar filled with canned vegetables from their garden.

On an autumn day when the big kids had kept me from their games, I found purpose helping uncle Chalk in his garden. We pressed the pitch fork into the ground together, then pulled on the handle with our combined weight. A tangled root ball of potatoes was unearthed in one row and peanuts in another. He’d rinse the peanuts, soak them in salt water, then take the wood-framed screens from the house windows and lay them on saw horses in the sun, spreading the peanuts to dry, making a snack that would last him all winter long.

Peppers growing in my garden. Composting. Planting.
Harvesting. Composting. Planting. Harvesting. Comp . . .

His wife, Ruby, though legally blind, cooked large meals in a kitchen most people today would think hardly better than campfire cooking. I recall her passing a plate of beets. The 7 or 8-year-old me shook his head no. She replied, peering through thick glasses that freakishly magnified her eyes, “You’ll have to say out loud what you want. I can’t see what you’re doing with your head.”

Dear woman.

I strain to hear that distant sound, receding in tone, no longer bright and clear, trying to connect with their traditions enough to amplify it. Maybe if I tend my own garden with sufficient love, refinish enough 120-year-old woodwork, can enough of my own vegetables and maybe if I polish enough intricately cast hardware, maybe then the sound will be clearer, that I’ll hear their world approaching bright and new, instead of deep and receding as history accelerates far past their memory.

That works for me and I feel connected to something bigger than the mindless bleating and shouting of modern pop culture from television, computer and phone screens.

What is it we get from running our hands along a newel post and stair railing polished smooth by 120 years of hands? Thousands of hands, touching it tens of thousands of times. In our houses babies were born and people died. Weddings and funerals were held. Over a century of Christmas trees decorated and that many Thanksgiving meals cooked and eaten. Little boys grew up and left our front doors to wars suspiciously spaced one each generation: Spanish/American, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, and the Gulf Wars. Our homes have known personal tragedies, joyous victories, thousands of moments of passionate intimacy, and no doubt many, many arguments. I’m just nutty enough to think all of that can’t happen in a house without having an effect on how the place feels – you know, like your favorite chair or most comfortable pair of jeans.

 

All that living makes a house feel different. We love the fish-scale shingles in the gable, the shaded porch, the brick sidewalk, but there’s something else. We’re trying to shed that American amnesia, we’re trying to take the past with us as we fill our houses with blue-tooth sound systems, flat panel TVs, and phone apps that control our lights and high-efficiency furnaces.

The handrail outside my buddy Greg's apartment in downtown Noblesville:

Oak paneled stairwells, the steps polished by leather and handrails polished

by palms and fingers since WWI.

In my 2^nd novel, The Salvage Man, the protagonist, Dan Reynolds is a silent middle-aged guy, for whom sharing emotions is painful. He's not much interested in seeking some textbook notion of history or hearing its receding sound amplified, but with a heart aching for things lost in the past, it happens to him inspite of himself. The book was inspired by getting vibes from the houses where I did architectural salvage as I looked to replace things previous owners removed from my own house. Sometime you get good vibes and sometimes bad. In my novel, Dan Reynolds discovers where the vibe come from. And the vibe is either the approaching or the receding sound. The more well-worn detail you remove from an old house, the more history accelerates and the quicker the sound recedes.

As I’ve gotten older, like the grumpy old man in Stegner’s Angle of Repose, it does seem like history, like all falling objects is accelerating. And I don’t want to be a typical American amnesiac as the speed increases, I want to listen for the past, keep the sound strong and bright and take as much of it with me as my heart will hold.

Buy Kurt's latest novel The Salvage Man

 “A broken man, an abandoned house, and a lonely woman—all the makings for a beautiful, haunting tale of loss, forgiveness, and redemption. The Salvage Man is a lovely, bitter sweet story you won’t soon forget. I loved it!”

Sherri Wood Emmons, author of The Seventh Mother

Buy Kurt's first novel Noblesville

“Meyer turns the pages of history with gentle care and a warm heart, creating a story I’ll remember forever. Thank you Kurt Meyer for opening a door to my beloved town’s past and allowing me to travel the streets and meet the people of Noblesville 1893.”

Susan Crandall, Author of The Flying Circus

The Etymology Of A Kitchen Island

“Please, let’s keep them, we can store 'em in the basement.”

I was pleading a little. A group of men stood in a circle in the parking lot, listening.

“Look, I’ve restored houses, sat on a committee that loaned money to restore historic properties and been a Realtor selling hundreds of historic homes, so trust me, I've learned this: people do work on historic properties convinced their project is the final word – that no one will ever want to change their perfect remodel. But that’s almost never true!”

The Presbyterian Church was being restored. I was begging the construction committee to put the weathered, original 1893, quartersawn white oak doors in storage rather than throw them away. The committee chair was a good man. He gave it a solid think, then shook his head and said, “Throw them in the dumpster.”

So I hauled the doors to my garage, a block away, stored them on-edge against a wall. I spent years trying to find them a home, banging my car door against them a couple times a week.

The back & sides of the new island, under construction in my garage.

A month ago I cut up 2 of those church doors to make the back and sides of our new kitchen island.

I’m a windows open guy. For years my family’s Sunday mornings have been anchored by the ringing of that church’s bell. When my middle son, Jack was an acolyte, he donned a robe and took his turns ringing the bell to announce the start of services.

When the island is installed, you’ll be able to cook or sit at it and look out toward the church bell tower.

When I first moved to town, my ex and I rented the first floor of a big, late 1890s home a block and a half down the back alley from here. There, our first baby, Cal, had textbook colic. He’d start crying at about 5:00 each afternoon and shriek like he was on fire until around 11:00. Nothing calmed him.

Nothing that is, but music.

The old house had a built-in, 10-foot long white oak bookcase we'd filled with books, albums, CDs, and a sound system. I’d sit beside those honey-colored shelves with baby Cal laid facedown across my lap, drinking a beer and patting his little back as he cried, listening to R.E.M., Ella Fitzgerald or Crash Test Dummies, soon discovering that his crying would stop for 20 or 30 seconds at the start of a new song and it's fresh sound or rhythm. So I slid my chair close to the bookshelves, pulled down it's little raised panel cabinet door to rest my beer upon it, and I changed the track on the CD the moment he started to cry. His sobs would stop in a sputter, his body pulling inward, as if clutching the sound against his stomach, and he was silent for half a minute – like the gears were turning in his tiny head, puzzling over the wonder of the compelling rhythmic noises. Then he’d start screaming again. I’d advance the track. He’d fall silent again. And on this went.

At lower left, the raised panel door from the old rental down the alley.

Lemme tell ya, babies react to the cosmic swoon of Ella, the baritone proclamations of Crash Test Dummies and the sometimes anxious, sometimes urgent pleading of Michael Stipe.

When Cal was a teenager, long after we moved to this house, the city was demolishing that grand old rental for a parking lot. A friend and I went in and did the salvage. As I was pulling the planks of that bookcase apart, Cal appeared in the doorway and spent an hour exploring the place.

The cabinet framework and little raised-panel door on the kitchen island I’m building came from the bookcase where I once worked for an hour or two each night trying to quiet that troubled baby.

Cal got a degree in Japanese, teaches English just outside Tokyo, and married a brilliant and beautiful Japanese woman. Visiting with them last October, many nights Cal and I drank beers around their kitchen table playing songs we liked for each other on our phones or youTube: “Have you heard this one?”

Twenty years ago I'd walk my youngest, a daughter named Sally in a stroller around the neighborhood. One evening we passed down an alley and found 3 old table leaves leaned up against a trashcan. The stain was dark and the finish dirty, but I could see they were white oak. I struggled to keep them tucked under an arm while pushing Sally home.

Those table leaves make up the drawer fronts on the new kitchen island.

The 7 layers of floor that were on top of the original artificially-grained kit-
chen floor. The top left, yellow/tan was the first added layer. Lower right is
an 1926 newspaper stuck to the floor beneath the oldest layer.

There are new children from a 2^nd marriage in this house now and we’re totally renovating the kitchen. Stripping up 2 solid inches of flooring, we counted 8 floors– an 1890s artificially-grained poplar floor covered with 7 later layers of linoleum and vinyl and 2 added layers of sub floor. Beneath those floors, the timber-frame, barn-like joints of the original 1870 incarnation of the house were revealed, attached to the “high-tech” balloon framing of the 1895 additions.  The new island, this “Frankenstein island,” made up of pieces and parts of ancient virgin forests that were timbered and milled into lumber that outfitted this neighborhood 120+ years ago, will straddle the confluence of the various eras of this house.

Nothing here is one thing. It is not just the existing neighborhood you see, nor one house or one marriage or one family, it is many generations and more than a century of architectural styles and interior décor fashions, pulled apart and pushed back together, the gloriously loved and beautifully fucked-up DNA of our old house, embodied in a brand new kitchen island.

This late 1890s photo of boys playing with tops beside Noblesville's Presbyterian Church shows (top/center) one of the doors I used for the side panels of my kitchen island.

Buyer Kurt's latest novel, The Salvage Man

“A broken man, an abandoned house, and a lonely woman—all the makings for a beautiful, haunting tale of loss, forgiveness, and redemption. The Salvage Man is a lovely, bitter sweet story you won’t soon forget. I loved it!”

Sherri Wood Emmons, author of The Seventh Mother

Buy Kurt's first novel, Noblesville

“Meyer turns the pages of history with gentle care and a warm heart, creating a story I’ll remember forever. Thank you Kurt Meyer for opening a door to my beloved town’s past and allowing me to travel the streets and meet the people of Noblesville 1893.”

Susan Crandall, Author of Whistling Past the Graveyard

Confessions Of A Dumpster Diver

“I wouldn't go in if I were you,” Russ said. "Something bad happened in there."

I raised an eyebrow toward the 1870s Italianate farmhouse, pushed askew by a backhow, looking like a house from a Dr. Suess story. “No house has ever given me a more threatening vibe,” he mumbled, shaking his head.

Stove pipe collar with removable central snowflake, salvaged from a farm

house in southern Michigan. When the stove is in place in the winter 

the snow flake is removed. When the stove is moved to the summer kitchen 

in the summer, snow flake is put in place to cover the hole.

We were at an old Hamilton County farmstead. Russ asked me to help him move cut stone steps he planned to use at his historic home in town. We were restoring houses a half block apart. The neglected farmstead was about to be leveled for a new subdivision.

I’d arrived late and wanted to check out the house for architectural salvage, but if Russ said don’t go in, I wasn’t going in. He’s a no bullshit guy. We loaded the cut stone (and amazingly found a native American ax head under the slabs) and left.

I started doing salvage when I was restoring my first home. Living on a teacher’s salary and restoring an 1890s Victorian cottage while raising children made buying reproduction hardware, rebuilt vintage light fixtures, and fresh-milled woodwork unthinkable. Salvage was the only answer.

Empty, aged, abandoned houses – once they’re free of the clamor and glare of a modern homeowner’s technology and decorating and the echoing vibe of personal belongings, their own rich, deeply burnished personality can radiate like a rolling wave spun from a 150 years of babies made and babies born, weddings, parties, dinners, blizzards and thunder storms, Christmases, son’s off to war, funerals, engagements and breakups, Sunday brunches and lonely afternoons, tens of thousands of cooked meals and just as many canned goods grown in the yard and stored in the cellar, faithful dogs and sleepy cats, grandma’s last breath and babies’ first steps, creating an emotional rush that can greet you with welcoming warmth, but occasionally a cold shoulder of rebuke.

Assorted escutcheons salvaged over the course of 25 years

Or not. Sometimes you feel nothing. It’s just wood, nails and plaster. But still, sometimes an old house on its deathbed speaks to you.

I started out picking trash. Pushing a child in a stroller on evening walks I’d find a pile of star bricks discarded behind a garage, knock on the back door and be told I could take them. I built my first patio with street paving bricks taken from an alley where my town’s judicial center is now and built the table that sat on that patio with disguarded oak planks found in an alley while walking a child in the evening.

I began digging in dumpsters parked in front of old house renovation projects. The dumpsters almost always yielded a decorative floor grate or long plank of quartersawn oak baseboard. These were hauled home, filling my little garage and back basement.

It allowed me to replace my 1960s front door with a proper ornate, stained glass door with a matching transom overhead, both salvaged and outfitted with salvaged hardware cast with elegant floral patterns. My porch had been enclosed with cinder block and cheap aluminum windows. Riding my bike to the dentist’s one day, I parked in his garage and saw a complete set of porch posts and ornate brackets stored in the rafters. Once I tore out the cinder blocks and shabby windows, those porch posts and brackets were put in place.

And most of it had been free. Most people I encountered thought it was trash and thought me odd for wanting it.

It may have been a fascination with archeology that kept me salvaging even when I didn’t need anything. My garage got filled with goose neck toilets, porch posts, fireplace mantels, and hand made Civil War-era doors, all of which I had absolutely no use for, they’d simply been in the collapsing old house or dumpster for the taking. I couldn’t bear to see them go to a landfill. Eventually I held a garage sale, promoting it weeks in advance to historic preservation groups throughout the central part of the state.

Carved stone pulled from an Indianapolis demolition site.

And there I faced my nerdy preservation bias. When someone wanted old woodwork or ornate iron just to decorate their walls, it felt wrong. But if it was being used to restore a house, I’d sell it at a bargain price. When you’re restoring a house, salvage isn’t just a compelling decorative item, it’s a necessity.
 

I bought the rights to salvage a couple houses and ducked into buildings to unscrew and pry thing off, just days, and at times, moments before they were demolished. Once, in Bluffton, Indiana, salvaging woodwork on the 2^nd story of an 1880s house that was being slowly demolished by a crew with sledgehammers and a Bobcat, I finished my work to find the stairs had just been pulled free. I had no way to get out. Fortunately, my father-in-law knew I was there and checked in to see how I was doing, shouting up from the street. He brought over a ladder, I tossed all the woodwork from a window into the yard and climbed down.

By the next day the house was gone.

Nickel plated hinge from men's lodge door. Downtown Tipton.

When you love old houses and want them restored, salvage can feel creepy, like you’re stealing wallets and jewelry from a dying person. I’ve had a house give me a cry of mercy (or I was projecting it onto the house myself in sympathy), saying, “Why are you doing this to me?” 

Once I stripped an entire turn-of-the-century farmhouse in Henry County. Six months later I decided to drive by and grab a piece of hardware I knew I’d left only to find the house crawling with workers renovating it.

That made for a pretty shitty feeling.

The doors, floor grates, woodwork, transom windows, lightening rods–you name it, were back in my Hamilton County garage. I called the farmer who’d sold me the rights and asked what happened. He said, “Somebody called and wanted to buy the house and a couple acres, so I sold it. But don’t feel bad. They hate old houses. They want to make it like a new house.

That made for an even shittier feeling. Like I was Dr. Frankenstein and I’d taken all the good parts, leaving someone with the dumb creature that was good enough for their homogenized sensibilities.

Some houses don’t make you feel anything. And dumpster diving is that way, too. At an old house construction site, the dumpster is the organ donor repository. You’re disconnected from the donor. But at several old houses I got a tingling on the spine and hair stood up on my arms, like ghosts were watching me, outraged as I dismantled their stairway with the handrail they’d run their hands along for a lifetime–gripped as a toddler when learning to walk and eventually gripped in feeble old age, not understanding that I was saving it from going to a landfill or being burned as fire department training.

Still, more times than not, the houses felt welcoming, especially on warm, sunny days, like they understood completely what you were doing and why you were doing it, and glad to be of service to another old house.

My salvage experiences inspired my second novel, The Salvage Man, a story about a man trying to salvage his own life, while he strips a Civil War era farm house.

Buy Kurt's latest novel THE SALVAGE MAN

“Kurt Meyer’s The Salvage Man is a gentle Midwestern fantasy made up of one treasure after another. Part historical fiction, part love story, and part rumination on modern day life, this novel asks hard questions about the world we live in and the world we leave behind. I couldn’t put it down.”

Larry D. Sweazy, author of A Thousand Falling Crows

Buy Kurt's novel NOBLESVILLE

“Meyer turns the pages of history with gentle care and a warm heart, creating a story I’ll remember forever. Thank you Kurt Meyer for opening a door to my beloved town’s past and allowing me to travel the streets and meet the people of Noblesville 1893.”

Susan Crandall, Author of Whistling Past the Graveyard