Every 6 weeks, on a Saturday or Sunday, I go to my favorite hairdresser and get my roots dyed, then all the rest of my hair is “gooped up” for the last 8-10 minutes, then I get it frosted, and cut.  This whole damn process takes about 2+ hours. And a lot of dollars.Â
As a young girl, I never colored my hair. I wouldn’t dare. I was afraid, and the fear lasted until I was well into my 30’s. See, my mother had very dark brown hair, just like me, and started going very gray in her early 40’s. She said she thought it was stress-induced – she buried my father on her 40th birthday after 20 years of a very happy marriage. She went very gray unnaturally fast. That was 1955. She started to color her hair, uncomfortable with being relatively young for such an amount of gray. In those days, I’m sure the dyes were much harsher than they are today.  I remember that her hair felt like, well, like a Brillo scrubbing pad, like steel wool. Horrible.
When I was 13 or 14, the movie Cleopatra came out, and everyone, just everyone, was dying their hair black. I remember my SIL (then, my brother’s girlfriend and several years older than me) coloring hers, which was dark brown to start with. And with her coloring, it looked great.  So I told my mother I was going to do mine, too. She said, “OK, go ahead.”  Uh oh, I knew my mother was opposed to young ones coloring their hair – why was she giving in so easily? Something was wrong here.   Then she said, “Go ahead. But don’t go to sleep at night because I’ll come in and cut it all off!”  Ha! Ha!  She was kidding, right?  Right? Was I sure about that?  Uh, should I take the chance?   I was 98% sure she was kidding, it was just a threat and she’d never really do that, but I was 2% sure she would. I think I was 33 years old the first time I colored my hair, just to lighten the brown up a bit, and I was living in another country at the time. Still, I wondered what she’d do when she found out.
In my early 40’s I realized that I either inherited my mother’s genetic tendency to gray early and fast – or her ability to bundle most of life’s stresses into the 40-50 decade. One or the other turned mine gray very fast – and in this day and age, I was probably more self-consious of graying early than she had been. And so I started coloring it. Originally, dark as it had naturally been.  Over the years, I’ve lightened the shades to avoid looking like a hooker or an idiot.
But the price gets higher, it consumes a great deal of one of my precious few days off over and over – and ya know, I have still gotten older – this ritual hasn’t held back time, or held up my boobs or my ass. Who in the hell am I kidding?? Having gotten to the point where I’m closer to 60 than to last Christmas, it was time to re-evaluate my priorities. For the last few times I’ve gone to the hairdresser, she’s used a much, much lighter shade. This to minimize the “skunk line” where white meets color. And that lighter shade fades. She’s only doing the roots, no additional color on the length. Today, I got it cut WAY short. Not like a man’s haircut, with the ears cut out, but way short for me! And NO DYE!  I laughed as I told her that I might be back in the shop in a month asking her to dye it, but right now, today, I want to let it grow out.
My husband is a few months younger than I am. He has a full head of black hair, with about 18 gray hairs. That’s all. He is 58. No graying at the temple. No salt and pepper. Oh, there’s a few in his beard, but he stays clean-shaven and no one hardly ever sees that.  Will it make me look 20 years older than him?
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And then there’s the car.  I have a Ford Escape SUV. Pop has an old Ford Ranger pick-up. (He loves his Ranger!) Generally, when we go anywhere together, we go in my car. His truck is too full of junk and dirty, and he sneaks cigarettes while driving to work so it stinks. We take my car. Last week, we went up to my son’s, and Pop was driving while I worked on my lastest yarn project. He made sort-of a 3-point turn, and on one of the points, hit a big decorative boulder, scraping up the back of my car. I’ll never let him forget.
Tonight, we went out to eat, to a restaurant near the local Super Wal-Mart. Pop needed golf tees and a new golf glove, which we could get right there. But we walked around, looking at all sorts of things we don’t need, and when we came out, it was dark. I got in the passenger side, letting him drive, as my vision is not at its best after dark but also reminding him not to back into other cars, or posts or wandering wild rocks.Â
I’ve driven other people’s cars, ones that I wasn’t real familiar with, so I shouldn’t have laughed. I really shouldn’t.  He started it up, turned on the headlights, and instead of reaching to the center of the vehicle to let down the emergency brake, he reached out with the other hand – to the very spot where he releases HIS parking brake – and popped up the hood!!!
I almost wet myself, on my own upholstery.
