In my most recent battle with the aging process, I’ve discovered the fountain of youth is apparently overflowing with pigeon pea paste.

Thankfully, pigeon pea paste is not made from the stuff that turns city statues white. I mean, nobody has to stand under a telephone line with a bucket to get this miracle goo. The pigeon pea is a shrub from India, and when it’s ground up and boiled into a paste some say it helps prevent hair loss. I guess they forgot to tell Gandhi.

Anyway, pigeon pea paste is just one of the bizarre hair loss cures I stumbled across in my quest to avoid applying more and more sunscreen to the top of my head at the beach this summer. The good news is I don’t have to import exotics from India. I can just open the vegetable crisper in my refrigerator. Apparently, lettuce and spinach juice have the same miracle hair growing power as the pigeon pea paste. The bad news is that I wasn’t aware lettuce and spinach had juice, and if they did, I’m pretty sure I’d never take them off the grocery store shelf.

Another vegetable crisper cure is to twice daily rub an onion on the bald spot until it turns red then douse it with some honey. I could get on board with this cure if I weren’t worried about smelling like a sweet Rush’s chilidog for the rest of my life.

The home remedy folks also suggest is the use of rosemary and sage. I guess the aroma of Thanksgiving dinner is better than fast food, but do I really want to go through life making people wonder why they get a strange craving for cranberry sauce every time I walk in the room? Plus, I could shove my head in a salad or a turkey for the rest of my life and still have more and more of my scalp exposed to the world.

That’s the problem – no potential cure comes without guarantees or side effects.

I could venture out of the natural world and into chemicals like Propecia. The research looks promising, and I won’t smell like Grandma’s kitchen, but some side effects include rash, itching, hives, and nipple discharge. I’m pretty sure my wife would find my bald head much more attractive than a full head of hair that was attached to someone that looked like they’d been nursing a baby and rolling in poison ivy.

That leaves Rogaine. The side effects aren’t as drastic as nipple discharge, and former NBA great Karl Malone used to be the Rogaine spokesman. A few years back, Malone was extolling the virtues of Rogaine. Well, Mr. Malone is bald now… very bald.

I guess that’s why God invented hats. If He wanted us to rub onions on our heads, then I believe He would have made them smell like Pert. If the fountain of youth is bubbling up from a bush in India, then I guess I’ll just have to use a little more sunscreen this summer.

And if chemicals are the answer, then I’ll stop asking the question because life is too short for nipple discharge.