The Eyebrows/The Other Facebook

Me, a high school summer when I worked at Astroworld; I wish I still had that blouse.
There was a booklet that I think was sent out to incoming freshman (as we were called) in Ye Olden Days. Or maybe we got it in our Orientation packets. Maybe it was called Facebook. It consisted of photos of the 1800 or so of us in the class, with home street addresses and names of high schools. I'd wondered briefly from time to time where it was. When I was home this week I came across it. I found that my first oncologist at Fancy Hospital was in my class, and I wondered what happened to the guy I had a crush on that first year in the dorm. We were friends. We ate breakfast together often, and I remember being disappointed when his parents came to visit and he didn't make sure that we met. I don't think I embarrassed myself with any overt overtures. Thank God. I'd thought about him from time to time but could never remember his last name. I remembered he was from a suburb of a big city, a suburb with a magical name I'd never heard before. It sounded like the name of a fairy tale.


Well, there he was in the Facebook booklet. I knew he'd been pre-med. He is an oncologist and surgeon in the suburbs of another large Eastern city. Patients have reviewed him favorably.. He saved the life of someone's father. One grumbly patient said he was ignored for hours and then the doc asked him what he was doing there, said there was no time for him, that he had been squeezed into the appointment book that day. We don't know, of course, if this patient was screaming at the time/totally off his rocker. That is the value of online, anonymous comments.

This doc was in a video advertising the hospital he's with. He says he enjoys getting to know patients in this small hospital, getting to know their families, about their travels, etc. He seems sincere. He had an thin though owly face in college; here his face is filled out. What I can't get over are his eyebrows. In the Facebook photo, they're pretty flat with just a slight curve. In the video they're almost a semi-circle.

Can eyebrows change that much? Has anyone studied this? Perhaps detectives who deal with missing persons have. I'm not going to look it up.
Oops! Surely I didn't miss the deadline for sending in pics!
My eyebrows are pretty much the same as they were in high school.


Because they are fake. I lost much of my eyebrows during chemo and they didn't come all the way back. Plus we lose our eyebrows with time. They migrate to our chins. Anyway, I use a mascara-type makeup to fill in my eyebrows. Sometimes they're too thick and I find out, in the middle of the day when I'm looking in a mirror, that I've been Groucho-like all day.

I nosed around for the doc's CV, family, publications, etc. It seems that he's guarding his privacy. Afraid of being found by old wanna-be girlfriends? Or--maybe he's gay and wants to keep it close to his vest. That would explain how he could resist my charms at 18, when my face was still oval and my eyebrows thick enough to pluck.

When I worked at Astroworld we had a yearbook. I remember dressing as Groucho for a picture and I was so convincing that girls did a double-take when I went into the locker room to change back. I can't find that picture but here I am the summer before senior year of high school, in the 1890s store, where I worked with the silhouette artists.

Distracting a silhouette subject