Hair

I don't think I've ever fallen into the trap of following hair trends. Mainly I've had mine long with the odd excursion into sort of short but never all the way there as stylists were always appalled when I thought I could pull off a Helen Mirren.

But your head, they said, it's very - um - large.

Large it is, I can never find a hat to fit it. Stopped trying a long time ago.

I think it all depends on whether you're a hair off the face person or not.

I find that many men get very sensitive about hair as they age. The increasing absence of it.

Here I am around 16. Not much has changed in my preferred hairstyle in sixty years. Up or down, it's long.

I've always had super thick hair (enough for two heads, one of my aunts put it) but it did start to thin out a few years ago and I realized that all the complaining about it when younger had put a jinx on it and now I, too, was going bald. So I had utmost sympathy for the above mentioned balding men. I was now in their club, so to speak.

Well, I didn't go bald. But alarmed I was and someone said up your vitamin E intake which I did and it stopped the hair loss.

So then I started to regrow it in earnest. Mainly because I know this woman who has this marvelous white/grey messy pigtail down her back and I wanted to be like her when I grew up even though she was 10 years younger than me. My hair will never be that lovely silvery thing. It has always looked like a bad dye job. And I haven't dyed mine in oh, say 30 years. Right now it is silvery/grey/brown on my head and then further down, a nice shiny brown. I tie it back right now and it cascades nicely (I think) but I don't ever see the back of me as I walk around so they all could be pointing and laughing and mocking and I wouldn't know, would I.

While my hope would be for it to be like this:

So hair - men and women alike. How do you accommodate aging hair. Chop it all off? Polish your expanding pate? Let it grow? Spend lots and lots on crimping and dying and blonding? Grieve your younger hair?

Do tell.

PS And just for the hell of it, here's a treat.

Hangin' with my new friend.

Through a variety of circumstances which I won't get into here I'm spending a huge quantity of time with a 28 year old young woman. To my astonishment, we never run out of conversation and she has invested quite a degree of trust in me which warms my heart. I'd never met her before. And from an initial standoffishness I see how her face lights up when she sees me now and she introduced me to her 4 year old on the phone tonight. (She's lost custody of her babies)

She asks me intelligent questions about my life, how I came to this point, did I like being a mother, my job, my relationships.

She mentioned that she was going to a big birthday party for her grandmother in a few weeks' time and it was the first birthday she would ever attend for a really old person.

I asked her how old her grandmother was.

"Oh," she said, thinking for a minute,"70 or 80 I guess."

I guess we all look the same to the young'uns when we cross that old 40-50-60 mark.

But the sweetest thing, when I dropped her off at her parents' home tonight she says:

"Now you be sure to text me when you're safely in your door, k?"

I seriously can't remember when that was said to me last.

You Make Me Feel So Young ♪♫

View from Signal Hill, taken this past summer.

I have a friend who isn't thirty yet. We met aeons ago in a writing workshop in Toronto and took a shine to each other. I'm old enough to be her grandmother if I think about that aspect of it, but I rarely do. We like the same food and each other's writing and each other's unique qualities. She flew to St. John's from Toronto where she lives for 6 days recently so she could touch the ground here and walk the streets and meditate around and around Signal Hill. Signal Hill didn't feel the same about her as it hadn't let go of its snow and ice yet.

But she was up for the challenge with her weighty boots ("you should get a pair of Blundstones" she tells me). Her luggage never arrived but that didn't phase her. She just borrowed a few bits and stated several times, all you need is underwear and two pairs of socks and you're good to go, and viewed the non-arrival of her luggage as a touchstone to more simple living.

We walked around our hilly city for a while and then settled on Indian food. We were both craving it. She guided me to a hole in the wall, International Flavours, I hadn't really noticed before then. A mother and son ran it. And the food! Oh to die! I will go back and think of her each time.

She startled when I mentioned one of her characters from years ago. She confessed with tears in her eyes that she's had writer's block for over seven years and can't even write her thesis, a final qualification on her journey to being a doctor of Chinese medicine. "But," she said, "I am so thrilled you remember my Fanny as this was part of my little sojourn here, to see if Fanny would speak to me again. And she has this morning as I meditated and now you bring her up too!!"

She then proceeded to list out and have me write down all her artistic contacts (she was a cinematographer in her very early twenties in St. John's)here in Newfoundland.

And the really splendid part of our get-together? She made me feel eternally young and just full of possibilities.

Date Rape is a Hoot.

Nephew: wats the best chat up line???
22 hours ago · Comment ·LikeUnlike R******D**** likes this.
E**** N***** ‎"Excuse me, do you think this rag smells like chloroform?"
21 hours ago · LikeUnlike · 2 people
Nephew and M**** C***** like this.
Me: I can't even list the amount of WRONGS in that appalling statement...
16 hours ago · LikeUnlike ·
K**** H*****: That is quite possibly the best 1 i've ever heard e****!!!
10 hours ago · LikeUnlike
D***** F**** Are u retarded cos u look special to me
2 hours ago · LikeUnlike
T***O'D****: guy puts a cold bottle against girl...girl reacts...sori bt ur so hot had 2cul u dwn sum how!

Above is an exchange on FaceBook over the last day. I italicized my own comment. The reason I posted a comment?

The originator of the original query is my nephew and the responses are from his friends. They are all around 21 years of age.

I am completely disgusted, discouraged and dismayed that this is how he and his friends feel about women. And that none addressed the comment of his aunt.

(1) Women need to be rendered unconscious to allow men to do whatever they choose with them?
(2) Women are not human and therefore not in need of any respect?
(3) Separate rules would apply for their sisters and mothers?
(4) Have any of them heard of date rape?
(5) Have they even attempted to think about themselves being victims of an incapitating drug administered by a stranger?

And on. I'm sooooo tired of all this.

I'm completely disheartened that this is a younger male relative (university student). My friends, this is how he and his peers are devolving.

Hello Gaia? Shrug us off. Right now.