First Comes Combing Hair, Then Conversations About Bumblebees

I caught my son combing his hair the other day.

That’s new. For 12 years, the way his hair was when he woke up in the morning--matted down like wet grass or sticking out like pine needles--that’s how he left it.

But now, he wets his hair very carefully. Then he takes a brush and combs it forward, making it flat and even. Then he parts it in the middle and swirls it out to the sides. I am dating myself horribly here, but he looks exactly like a character Ernie Kovacs played, Percy Dovetonsils.

I used to comb my hair for hours at a time when I was his age. I think that’s why it fell out--I overcombed it.

I would stare at the mirror as I tried to make my hair look exactly like the teenage singing idols of the day, Frankie Avalon and Fabian. They wore their hair in these complicated, cascading pompadours that trickled down in the middle of their foreheads to a spit curl.

One singer, Jimmy Clanton, wore his hair high, like a hedge. He was somehow able to roll up the sides of his hair so they met in the middle of his forehead and formed a perfect V. His hairdo had the aerodynamic look of tail fins on a Cadillac Eldorado. Not only is my son combing his hair, but more shocking, he’s also caring about his clothes.

My son never cared about what he wore before. He wore the same stuff every day. We do the wash every Sunday at home. I’d say, “Bring me your hamper so I can wash your dirty clothes.” And the hamper would be empty.

“Where are the clothes you wore all week?” I’d ask.

“I wore these,” he’d say, meaning what he had on at that moment.

“All week?”

“I like them,” he’d say.

But now he wears a clean polo shirt every day, and pressed khakis. I started caring about clothes the summer I turned 12 because something overwhelming happened to me whenever I was in the proximity of a girl named Jadis, who said she thought I would look good in the outfit displayed at a clothing store in our hometown. There was a raspberry mohair sweater and a bleeding madras shirt.

My parents were stunned. I’d never asked for anything except sneakers before. That evening, my father sat me down and for the first time in my life I heard the word “zygotes.”

So I should have suspected what my friend Nancy would say after I told her about my son’s new obsessions with his hair and clothes.

“He’s having sex!”

“He’s only 12 years old,” I protested.

“The next thing that will happen,” she said, “is the door to his room will be permanently closed until he’s 20 years old. And whenever he does open that door, an aroma will come out that I can only describe as feral--you’ll feel like a wolf has moved into your son’s room. And the next thing is you’ll come home, and there will be two wet towels on the bathroom floor.”

“So?”

“He’ll have taken a shower with his girlfriend!”

The next day I recounted that doomsday scenario with a friend whose son was also 12.

He, too, had noticed his son’s sudden interest in hair and clothes--and an interest in his son displayed by some of the girls in his class, who were hanging around the Little League field. “It’s the beginning of the dance of the bumblebees,” he said.

A couple of days later, our boy graduated from sixth grade. He grabbed me at the ceremony and said, “You remember that talk we had, about the dance of the bumblebees?”

“Well, that very night my son had a date! I drove him and a girl to a movie, and I picked them up afterward. When I asked him about the date, he said, ‘Dad, don’t talk to me, OK?”’

“This was a real date?” I asked. “Not in a group?”

“A real date. One boy. One girl. The movies. You’re next.”

That night, I sat my son down and introduced him to the word “zygote.”