“Dear Father,
Today, again, I wore a beanie-style hat to the arena. Despite my having worn the same hat once before, it drew many comments from the arena staff, with whom I am very friendly. One woman, who helps to clean our locker rooms, told me unprompted that her husband is balding like me but she loves him all the same. Her words lightened my heart momentarily, but then she joked about his morning mirror habits, which involved close inspection of his hairline, and my mood was destroyed once again, for that is the same routine I follow every morning of my life.
I could not help myself, father. Tonight, after the game was over but before I even went home, I looked up, with the aid of the internet, the locations of known gypsy settlements in Croatia. Thoughts of vengeance against the itinerant race of people who cursed our family line with baldness are becoming more frequent in my mind.
In my young adulthood, before I left for America, I remember that the local police were often unwilling to investigate acts of violence against the Roma, since their citizenship status was much in doubt. Please let me know in your next correspondence whether the attitudes of the police have changed in the intervening years. If I knew that I would be persecuted swiftly for any ill deeds committed against the wandering gypsies, perhaps these thoughts would diminish in intensity.
It is not fair, father. In my life I have done nothing bad. I have committed minor mistakes, I admit, but nothing I have done would deserve the cursed fate of premature hair loss. If time machines were a true technology, I would use one to revisit the day when my great-great-great-great-great grandfather lost that bet with a gypsy over some stupid carnival game, then reneged on that bet, leading us to generations of despicable baldness. I would slap him across his face and tell him to pay the money he owned to the gypsy. Then, in the present day, my hair would be lush and beautiful, and all cleaning ladies in the arena would swoon at the sight of it, wishing their husbands had hair so grand as mine.
That is all I wish, father. But it is only that. A wish, forever unattainable. Curse this hair of mine!
Your loving son,
-Bojan”