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Finding My Roots

I want to talk about roots. Not genealogy not ancestors, but hair color. And hair color, at a certain time of life, is about more than just color. It is about age. Babies, for instance, are not born with gray hair.

When I saw my first strand of gray, more years ago than I am going to tell you, I started the evasive action that is a part of aging.

Up until about 20 years ago, I colored my hair myself. I have to admit that in those days, I read the package directions for application casually. I never did the strand test recommended in the instructions to see what an entire head of the color would look like. That was a mistake.

Once, when I washed the dye out as instructed, my hair was purple! Today, if you have purple hair, that is hip. Even grade schoolers may have a purple streak, thankfully sprayed on with washable coloring.

I tried to fix my purple hair by recoloring with strawberry blonde. I almost followed the directions on the package as I applied it, but of course, without a strand test.

Another mistake. My purple head was surrounded by a hazy pastel halo. Again, incredibly cool if I were a teenager. I was not a teen even then and there was nothing at all incredibly cool about the way I looked, unless I told people I was auditioning for a job as a clown.

Still, I knew what to do next – call my friend Allison, who lived in Seymour. Allison and I had been among the five Connecticut bicyclists who had joined a cross-country bike ride in 2000 to raise funds for the American Lung Association.

Allison was not simply a much younger, better and faster biker than I was; she was also an unparalleled fashion advisor. She, in fact, had developed a survival strategy for the ride: if I couldn’t be fast, at least I could be fashionable. She dictated that all our biking clothes and vital accessories like gloves, helmet, and shoes should match the colors of our bikes. We trained together, but more important, we shopped together. I dressed with pride every morning on the ride and always finished among the last of the large group of riders.

Allison had a solution to the hair problem, actually two solutions, short-term and long-term. Short term, she told me to put on a baseball cap; long term she told me to go to her hairdresser, whom she promised could fix anything. He and his ace operative have kept me rootless, in hairspeak, for more than two decades.

There was a crisis during the pandemic lockdown when hair salons had to close for some three months. My daughters-in-law made me promise that I would not color hair on my own. Three months of that and I was a different lady, one that my inner-self recognized as age-appropriate, but my hair-coloring genes refused to accept.

There was one small change when the salon reopened, and I returned to color; I left a hunk of white in the front, as much of a concession to reality as I could manage or as an unsuccessful attempt to look like a mutant zebra.

And so once a month, I still try to defy the impossible-to-escape realities of age at the hairdresser. It won’t work forever. Time will win, for all of us. It always does.

But in the meantime, I will hold up my side of the game played to fool the advancing years, with the ever-increasing suspicion that the only one I am really fooling is myself, and even that is getting harder.