Day 280... Embracing the Gray

I have gray streaks all over my hair.  Actually I like it.  I always have, not because it looks good but more because I am lazy.  The gray started as a "dot" right at the hairline on the left side.  I spent a couple of years (way back when in my thirties) having my hair highlighted on a regular basis and one day saw the DOT.  I did start thinking then about what other people would think "she's getting old..." especially at work.  And then sometime in the earlier nineties I just gave in to it.  I had more important things to focus on.  When my daughter chose a key chain for me at Disneyland of Cruella DeVille I realized the dot had spread.

I liked it.  My husband didn't.  I'm sure my graying hair made him feel old.  So, after much pressure I colored it.  Ugh!  It was a reddish auburn color.  The kind you can almost see through in the sunlight (I have very thin hair but lots of it).  To me it was hideous.  My daughter and her friends at the time didn't like it either... "It didn't look like me, Mrs. D" anymore.  My skin tone didn't match it for some reason but the bottom line was maintenance = too much, too often.  Besides, I was happy to tell anyone who commented that I was earning every one of those gray hairs.  I kept it shorter because then I thought that more appropriate for a woman of my age.  I never wanted then and now still to appear to be like a woman who was desperately looking like she was younger than she was.  At that time long graying hair reminded me of aging hippies wearing ill fitting (to say the least) halter tops at the shops in Woodstock.  NOT attractive.

Now that I am approaching sixty I have decided to let it grow longer too (hmmmm does that indicate I am "letting go"?).  I was thrilled the other day because I was able to put my hair in a teeny tiny pony tail.  Not particularly attractive now but soon I may hopefully have that "simply sophisticated lower pony tail" style.  Give me that, some pearls and a simple white shirt and I'll be dressed for anything.  During this awkward stage where my hair is really too long to leave down (too flat on top and drags my facial features to places I'd rather it not) and too short to put in a acceptable  ponytail I just put it up here and there with a random bunch of clips.  Two things help me make the style passable:  assorted little clips holding pieces here and there look okay only because of the hues of gray streaks, and, I can keep it all together because I have found a hair spray that would stop a bird in flight.  I would love to be the image of an eccentric artist or aging ballerina.  Then again, the reality may be that I look like the singing  witch in that Bugs Bunny cartoon where she is humming happily as she is readying everything for rabbit stew... hairpins flying and floating as she moves with delight around her kitchen.

And, lucky for me the gray isn't yellowy or, God forbid made to look blue!  Back to my age and my time:  I remember the old ladies with blue and/or purple hair lined up in lawn chairs in front of the apartment building in the Bronx yelling at the kids and talking amongst themselves.  Could they have been as young as in their sixties then?  Of course they seemed sooooooooo old!