Birthdays, for some reason, are opportunities for the people in your life to dig up old photographs of you and post them on social media. This is meant to be playful and affectionate — a gentle sort of reminder about how time passes and skin loosens, especially around the face and jaws — and mostly it’s fun to read the good wishes of the commenters. They’ll add something like, “You still got it!!!” or “What a hottie back then!!!” And it’s a nice little boost on what otherwise would be just another step closer to assisted living.

This year, on my birthday, I was faced with something more disturbing than photographic reminders that the reaper comes for all of us. I was struck, in a photograph from 1975 posted by my own mother, by the news that I once sported what can only be described as a “helmet of hair.” Sitting akimbo on my bike, in clothes that I would wear today — a white Izod alligator polo shirt and a pair of khaki pants — there is a beehive-shaped cone of hair sprouting out of my head. There is, in fact, as much hair above my forehead as there is face below it. I look like I’m wearing a dervish skullcap or some enormous brown bonnet. I am a freckle-faced boy in the eye of a hurricane of hair.