Bald Stories
folktales about hairless mentranslated and/or edited by
D. L. Ashliman
© 1998-2000
Moral: Yield to all and you will soon have nothing to yield.
A man of middle age,
Fast getting gray,
Thought it would be but sage
To fix the marriage day.
He had in stocks,
And under locks,
Money enough to clear his way.Such folks can pick and choose; all tried to please
The moneyed man; but he, quite at his ease,
Showed no great hurry,
Fuss, nor scurry.
"Courting," he said, "was no child's play."Two widows in his heart had shares --
One young; the other, rather past her prime,
By careful art repairs
What has been carried off by Time.The merry widows did their best
To flirt and coax, and laugh and jest;
Arranged, with much of bantering glee,
His hair, and curled it playfully.The eldest, with a wily theft,
Plucked one by one the dark hairs left.
The younger, also plundering in her sport,
Snipped out the gray hair, every bit.
Both worked so hard at either sort,
They left him bald -- that was the end of it."A thousand thanks, fair ladies," said the man;
"You've plucked me smooth enough;
Yet more of gain than loss, so quantum suff.,
For marriage now is not at all my plan.She whom I would have taken t'other day
To enroll in Hymen's ranks,
Had but the wish to make me go her way,
And not my own;
A head that's bald must live alone;
For this good lesson, ladies, many thanks.
Her husband feigned ignorance and protested, "Certainly not! I would never do a thing like that." Then to prove his innocence he let his wife pull out his black hair. In her jealousy she pulled it all out, so that he might no longer be attractive to his mistress. And so the old man became completely bald.
Still half asleep, the student scratched his head, and finding no hair, he said, "That stupid fool of a barber made a mistake and woke up the bald man instead of me."
Everyone knows that Saint Peter is entirely bald, except for a single lock of hair in front that falls over his forehead, but most people do not know the following story that explains how this came to be.
While he and Christ were traveling together they came to a farmhouse where the farmwife was just cooking up some large yeast pancakes in grease. According to others it was noodles.
Saint Peter entered the house to beg for some pancakes, while the Lord waited outside. The farmwife was a good-hearted woman, and she gave Peter three pancakes, fresh from the pan. But Peter was selfish, and in order to gain an advantage when the pancakes were divided up, he quickly hid one of them in his cap, then put it on his head. He pretended that he had received only two pancakes, one of which he gave to the Lord.
The pancake under his cap was still hot, and it began to burn Peter terribly on the head, but he could not do anything about it; he just had to bear the pain.
Later, when he took off his cap, he discovered that the hot pancake had burned into his head a large bald spot, which remained with him as long as he lived. Only the lock of hair that had protruded from the front of his cap was spared. Thus Saint Peter's bald head has one lock of hair in front.
The vulture now became conceited. He strutted about in his borrowed feathers, and declared that he was the most beautiful of all the birds. He became more and more proud until he asked the birds to recognize him as their king. At this insolence, the birds pecked off, no only the feathers that they had given the vulture, but also the vulture's own feathers. So when the birds had finished with him, the vulture looked old and ugly and bald. That is why even at the present day the vulture is a sour and ugly old bird.
|
Eating much of sweetness you do not know if it be sweet
anymore. But the evil in a man shows, and you know it very well. |
One time, when the world was young and men and women were ill because an evil spirit possessed them, there lived a man and his wife who were very poor. A devil came and took possession of each of them and made them both sick. As they were not rich they couldn't invite a holy lama to read prayers for them, so invited a lay-brother in his stead.
After a while this man who was reading began to get very hungry. It was the custom to give the priests the best of food, but this man and his wife had no butter nor meat nor fine things to eat. They had no horses, nor yak and only one goat. So the reader began to think to himself that if they would kill this goat he'd have plenty to eat, as it was really pretty fat.
The man who owned the house was bald headed and now he came up and sat on the roof near where the man was reading. He really sat down in front of him and heard the man mumbling his prayers, "Om mani padme hum. Om mani padme hum," he was reading, and read right on in the same tone, "The god says if a man is bald headed and will take the skin of a goat and put it on his head he will have hair."
The old man sat and heard him read this over several times and finally decided it was there in the book of prayers; so he killed the goat.
They all had some good eating for a while, and the old man put the skin on his head, wore it and wore it for days and days and kept feeling his head, but not a single hair would come. He finally concluded that the man had lied to him out of the book, and besides, he thought, "If I wear this too long, I fear all the skin will be worn off my head and there will be nothing but bone."
So he asked the man about it, whether he hadn't lied to him, and he said, "O, no, but if a man would have what the gods say come true, he must pray a great deal himself." Thus he got around his lies and had goat to eat as well.
Revised November 14, 2000.