The Rising Tide of White

Every morning I look in the mirror and find a razor-gray stripes highlighting my round face. They are prolific little buggers and I've given up trying to control them. It wasn't that I was trying to control them really, what I was trying to control was the red-ended grow out that is the last twenties years of my hair dying experimentation. My reasons for attempting to modify my dye-crazy behavior and let the gray grow out is due, in part, to watching my mother's hair grow, dye, and be cut. The two of us have been dying our hair a nice rusty auburn color for so long that people assume we are natural reddish-heads. Because of this, we've been unable to see the slow transition of our dark-ash-brown crowns turning to sterling. Catch my mother in a lull between dye-jobs and you'll find she has a white halo around her face and down her skull that spreads a few inches, as if Moses himself was parting the supermarket Red-Sea. By gauging the clone-like similarities between my mother and I, the decision was made to grow out the dye now and face aging head on (or at least on my head).

At 51, if you eek a peek under the red cloak, at the base of my mother's roots, you will see that her hair is a shiny white with a few stray brown survivors holding on for their lives. My hair, now down to my waist, is a result of nearly eight years of growing my hair out. From the skull, the first 5-6 inches is my natural color, the rest is curly, over-processed, reddish-brownish, what stylists without the right descriptive words call "ethnic-like" hair. Since we all have an ethnic heritage, I guess it's safe to assume that I got this hair from the smattering of god-knows-what European heritages with which I am composed. People more familiar with Irish folk will tell me that is where my curly coarse hair comes from. And the like for the Italian side of me. But there is that long lost branch of my heritage which remains a mystery. All I have is picture of the man who would've been my biological grandfather had he not passed in a plane crash when my mother was four, and a hazy memory of my great grandparents Zefa and Jesse Jones, both of who were blazing white-haired folk who passed long before I could ask them questions about that side of the family. All I knew is that Zefa made her way to Oregon on a wagon-train. The memory of sitting at her feet while she rocked in a chair telling me the story, is something I believe I made up. Maybe after my mom relayed the story to me herself.

Without knowing the heritage of that branch of my family, I am also not privy a great deal of additional knowledge. I know there are some Jones family in the SF are, but my curiosity hasn't compelled me to go dig through public records to find out more about this, as of now, fictitious family. Particularly since I've heard that a certain woman was brazen enough to say "Oh, bullshit" at a funeral my mother attended for her late uncle when the read the list of survivors and included her a a niece. Maybe I don't need to get to know the Jones family after all...

And I look at my grandmother, a Sparks, and see that it took here a long time to grow in the gray. And I look at my Dad who's 52 and see that he's just starting to brighten up a bit above the brow. His parents went gray - but not until much later - so I am sure that I am more Jones than I can ever imagine, though I can only look into the eyes of my mother and see her father's and see his mother's eyes and realize that not only do my eyes droop in the corners as they do, but that my hair might be one of the only living Jones histories with which I am able to have tactile contact.

In the mornings is when I touch it, feel it, get close to the mirror and examine the prism of light that passes through the hair and wonder how long it will take me to rid myself of the awful red-dyed ends hanging from my head, or how quickly I will turn platinum like my mother, my great-grand-mother, and if I will coil my hair in a bun as she did, or if I will find my way back to the dye and try to reclaim my youth for 11.59 in the beauty products aisle. Or maybe I will just love the hell out of this hair, all these stray grays that my ex individually points out while saying her name. And though they say that we don't go gray because of stress, even though we now know it's a chemical reaction that comes from the inside and works it's way out, these gray hairs are all bricks through the pathway that is my life.

So I'm gonna let them grow. Because although it's been a crazy ride, and a helluva journey, I'm ready (for now) to recognize that it's all been worth the slow rising tide of white upon my head.