“Dear Father,
I apologize for filling your mailbox with more correspondence from your distraught son, but you are my only source of comfort in these trying times. Today, while playing in a game against the Hornets team from North Carolina (such an odd choice for a team’s name, but I cannot argue, for I play on the team whose namesake is a racecar that doesn’t even race), I heard snickering from the stands. When I looked over, there were two young women pointing at me and my baldness.
Father, these women should be in love with me, yet all they do is mock the diminished hair which sits atop my scalp! I have all the things that are desired by women: fame, money, fitness, compassion, intelligence. But the one thing that I have been denied is the one thing that women most seem to desire, and that is a full head of hair. But no remedy or cure will ever allow me to regain what has been lost.
I am ashamed to say this, father, but I must: there are times when I wish you were the one that had gone bald, while I was the one who kept his hair. I know that my covetousness brings shame upon the family, but this truth has been bottled up inside me for far too long. I understand fully that the curse of the Roma, which has caused a plague of baldness on our family for generations, is not under your control, but I am upset that the curse apparently spared your hair while it ravaged mine.
Now I wonder if my lovely Lucija has even seen a picture of me since I departed the homeland. Perhaps she, too, would join in the mocking if she knew of my dreadful condition. Father, please tell me that nobody has told her of my baldness. She shouldn’t have to know. She should remember the handsome, strong-haired Bojan of her youth, not the old man that her Bojan has become.
I rue the day that my great-great-great-great-great grandfather entered into that deal with a vagrant gypsy. I rue that day so very, very much.
Your loving son,
-Bojan”