In The Grey Zone

I have recently accomplished what many women my age have only dreamt of….I have stopped colouring my hair. Oh, you were expecting something more daring, more interesting?. If you think this is not a big deal then you have not tried to be a woman in this society that has coloured her hair for thirty or forty years to maintain a façade of youth.  Our head of sometimes impossibly unnaturally coloured hair is our shield, our defense against aging. When we squint into mirrors, catch a glimpse of ourselves in a passing window or see a photo of ourselves, an illusion of youth is maintained by the colour of our crowning glory. How do we often describe someone to a stranger? By their height and hair colour. Its an important feature.  I was always a tall blonde, that made it simple to pick me out of a crowd.  My husband has been blessed by the gods of genetics with a lush head of mostly dark brown curls. He is the envy of his peer group and has been often accused of dying his hair. He does not and has the attractive touches of silver threads weaving through the brown to prove it.  So the desire for and envy of the hair colour of our youth runs through both sexes.    

                                                                                                                        ...aren't I cute?

I’m a natural blonde, white haired as a child.  As with most blondes, my hair darkened as I aged and I began adding highlights as a teenager. For years I had the long straight hair so admired by the sixties generation but it required a bit of lemon juice or the new favourite spray,“Sun In”, to maintain a “natural” streaky look. 

..."sun-kissed" in '74

Through my twenties and thirties those highlights were courtesy of my hairdresser at the salon.  Time consuming and expensive to keep up but necessary I felt, particularly as the grey hairs started to creep in.  At thirty-nine I lost all my hair to chemotherapy and when it grew back the colour was a uniformly depressing shade of medium-blah. Look it up, it's not nice. As tough as it was being bald, having an inch of medium- blah hair isn’t much easier when you are trying to recover your health and feel   positive about the world.  So off to the drugstore I went and on went the blonde dye when I got home.

Fast forward through another fifteen years of home colouring, salon colouring, highlights,etc.  Month after month, right before colouring it, I peered along the part in my hair and watched as the medium-blah shade changed to light-blah and then silver as the years passed.  When that half inch of roots was light enough I decided to take the plunge. That was over eighteen months ago and I quick cold turkey.  I knew that by fifty-seven I wasn’t fooling anyone with my blonde hair, no one would take me for a forty year old anymore so why bother trying to pretend?  I had read many stories of women who went through the same process.  One formerly dark-haired woman wrote that watching the grey hair grow in was like watching a glacier slowly creeping down her head. I loved the imagery, hated the idea but was curious to have the experience.

The good news is that for me it was a pretty painless process.  My hair is now a mix of very light blonde, silver, white, all shades of grey and some dark ash blonde. I like to call it Arctic Blonde.  Other than one semi-permanent colouring right at the three month mark  before I wedding I had to attend, there hasn’t been any need for additional highlights or gradual colour changes. I am free!  I have crossed one item off of the seemingly endless To Do list of maintenance on my middle aged body.  It’s a wonderful, wonderful thing.  On the days when I get out of bed and see a grey haired hag staring back at me in the mirror I shake it off and remind myself of all the upside, including the hours I have gained back from the chore of colouring my hair.

Honey blonde at 50
 Men proudly wear the badge of Silver Fox when they go all grey and I have decided on the title of Silver Siren. So if you dare, put down the bottle of dye and the rubber gloves and give in to the call of the Siren.  You know you want to.

     Silver Siren at 58

 

Trying to Make it Work!

Hi All,

Just a short post to see if my email subscription gadget is working. I've been having a problem getting my posts delivered to anyone who signed up on my blog site. I've made a change and hope this will work!

My Superpower

I have a superpower. Yes, I do. I didn’t acquire it until a few years ago but it might have been there all along. It just took a certain, ahem, maturity to bring it out.  I am a COW.  A Confident Older Woman.  It may not sound like much to you but it for me it ranks up with there the ability to fly or having laser vision.  Sometimes I am a Cranky Older Woman but the results are the same.  I get more of what I want.  Plain and simple and it’s wonderful. Here’s how my particular superpower works.  When one of those  young, sexy, svelte hostesses that are everywhere these days leads me to a table in the restaurant that is right opposite the restrooms or beside the bussing station and asks “is this alright?”, I say, pleasantly,  “No, is it possible to have that table over there?”  And I make eye contact with her and smile.  One must use one’s powers with great geniality.  Sometimes she quickly grabs up the menus she has laid down and says, “of course, no problem”.   Other times she pauses, goes back to the hostess station, consults her lists, confers with another staff member and then turns to me and says  “ Sorry for the wait, of course, no problem ”,  then she removes a ‘reserved’ sign and seats me.  It’s a beautiful thing.

A cow...

That is a very minor example of the use of the power.  I have used it for obtaining reimbursements that were at first denied, refunds that are tough to get, entrance into areas where I shouldn’t be, to get the use of something I need or simply for getting free things or discounts.  I am always pleasant, smiling and polite. Otherwise the superpower doesn’t work.  That’s just being rude or a bully. And if the power isn’t with me that day and I am denied, I accept that graciously. There will be another time.

                                                                                                            A "COW"

You may already have this power and think I’m an idiot for waiting so long to use mine but I was always a good girl. Took what I was given, didn’t ask for too much, didn’t make a scene.  But I’m getting older and I’m losing patience with other people determining things for me.  My husband was at times embarrassed by the use of my superpower but he is starting to really enjoy its benefits and will often employ me to make the requests that he cannot.  The power works best on all the younger people in the service industry, male and female, those young enough to be my children.  It is hard to say no to a woman who might remind you of your mother.  It’s the gift that you get with the thickening middle and the thinning hair.  Use it.

                                                                                                    

Once when seated in a upscale restaurant with friends, our party of four was then ignored for ten to fifteen minutes. Finally the young male host rushed over and apologized for the delay.  My friend gave him her dazzling smile and suggested that a complimentary bottle of Prosecco would help us overlook it. The young man paused for just a moment, trying to resist the power of the COW and then said, “of course, I can do that” and returned with the requested bottle.  My friend would not have made that request fifteen years ago.  There is a time between the years of youth and beauty, when flirtation is very helpful, and the era when the mature COW superpower kicks in and it’s not an easy one. The tired mother with two children in tow is not always well catered to or feels able to ask for what she wants.  She is too busy answering the demands of others.  But that time is behind me now. I am standing my ground, perfecting my pleasant but unwavering eye contact and not backing down.  When someone is heard to mutter, “what a cow” as I walk away I think to myself, “ yes, I am a COW and loving it. “

In The Vortex

I am sitting in a bar, the Cowgirl Bar, talking with a half-Persian, half-Native American young man named  Dakota.  He is trying to explain to me why he can’t seem to leave Santa Fe even though he wants to. We are in Santa Fe, a city where he has lived for five years and can’t seem to get away from. He tells me that there is a vortex here, a pull that keeps you and you just have to give into it until its ready to let you go.  He would like to travel, he really wants to get to Korea but until Santa Fe lets him go he will just have to relax and go with it. Swirl in the vortex. I get that.

Adobe curves...

I have been to Santa Fe six times in the last twenty years.  The City Different as it calls itself grabbed me from the get go. Everything about it is different from the area I live in. The elevation to start with, its at about 7000 feet and I live at sea level. Its all different up there! The rough dusky adobe buildings with their sensuous, rounded curves stand in painterly contrast to the huge deep blue sky that seems so much more intense than the insipid pale blue I gaze at out my window at home… when the blue is even there. The air is dry and smells of pine needles and dust, pinon fires and cooking chilis, both green and red.

Every time I am in Santa Fe wandering in and out of jewelry and clothing stores, staring at gorgeous art in the galleries, or in a bar sipping a green chili infused margarita, I always wonder whether I was an Indian or a cowboy in a previous life.  I am so drawn to the whole culture yet have no connection to it in my actual family history and daily life. I’ve been on a horse five or six times and own a pair of cowboy boots that I rarely wear.  That’s about it for the western lifestyle.  I’m leaning more towards the Native American side mostly because I love the jewelry! I could drape myself in rows of silver beads and turquoise of every shade and happily stagger around under its weight, rings on every finger, earlobes dragging with the weight of the beautiful stones.  Much more appealing to me than a cowboy hat and belt buckle.

My trinkets...

Or maybe it’s just the vortex, as my new friend Dakota says, that keeps pulling me back, trying to get me to stay. It's power reaching out to me through the richly veined stones and silver beads, the bright colours of the hand woven blankets and intricately tooled concha belts. Perhaps it’s not the things themselves, perhaps the pull is from somewhere deeper, the earth itself, the sapphire sky, the scent of the air. All I know is that I will be back and just maybe Dakota will still be there, swirling.