Tuesday Tendrils

An old piece of my writing in a journal:

"My life is but one wild brief dance in the ballroom of time."

I was wondering a couple of days ago (not sadly) when was the last time someone called me "darling" and came to the conclusion it was when an aunt, who lived to a great age up to a few years ago, used it as we had tea in front of her fire and she gave me gentle words of wisdom always interspersed with the word "darling". I use it myself, of course, to family members, to cherished friends. It is an important assuring word and we need to use it more to those who are dear to us. " My dear" or"Dearie" doesn't quite cut it, or "honey and "love"for that matter, I find those words quite dismissive and meaningless.

I am not having a good day health-wise, seems to be some bodily reactions going on but nevertheless I persist as best I can and showered and washed my hair and moaned to myself. And then Joanna (my cleaning lady) arrived as I was cancelling my plans for the morning with friends.

And the loveliest thing. I was sitting in my office chair letting my hair dry. I have a lot of hair and it is now long (no hair cutting/styling money pit anymore) and she began to stroke it and run her fingers through it and hum a bit and said:

"You know the last time I did this was when my daughter was about 12 and she let me, and it is one of the most beautiful things to do, isn't it? Run your fingers through long hair, your hair is so beautiful."

She made my sad, sick and sorry day.

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.

Fooled

Maybe it's my age, having lived looooong but today I was caught completely unawares at my hairdresser's. I think I wrote about her place before. An old Victorian house in St. John's. All artifacts preserved, fire places, chandeliers, crown mouldings. A darling place with stairs running everywhere and the best atmosphere.

Every six months they mix up all the cutters and stylists and colourists, give them new work stations in different rooms in the house, match them up with those they haven't worked with before.

"Keeps us all fresh," says Bernice my faithful stylist. She's a gift, took me from hair to the waist to a smooth bob that lasts and lasts. You find a good cutter you stick with her/him.

So now she's been matched with this absolutely outrageous stylist for 6 months. I think my jaw dropped when I cast eyes on her for the first time today. Breddie, her name sounded like. Breddie was dressed in an absolutely wild purple and orange mini-dress revealing much of her body. Bright red pumps with 6" heels. Piercings with hardware all over her face including her mouth and nose. Matching colourful tattoos featuring wild flowers covered both her legs, her arms, her breasts and her neck. Her dyed blonde hair with purple streaks swung to her waist festooned with yellow bits and bobs. And one long ostrich feather of emerald green. I took her for an out of control 19 year old.

"Breddie's a card," laughed my stylist who's in her mid forties and dresses soberly in black with sensible work heels and a soothing manner.

Well, thought I grouchily, "card" would be a massive understatement in my book. I can just see the drug den and the biker boyfriend and their lives of dodgy cop avoidance.

An older woman toddled in and sat in Breddie's chair and proceeded to ask her for the wedding photos from the weekend. Whose wedding, thought I, surely Breddie and her criminal dimwitted druggie biker wouldn't be invited to anyone's weddinge

So Breddie hauls out her Iphone and treats the four of us in the room to HER wedding pictures at a pricey well known golf club. In white. All tats under wraps. All hardware removed. Criminal Biker Boy is in a black tux and a perfect hairdo with not a tat or a piece of metal or leather or hairy armpits in sight.

And the killer shot? Their two little flower girls scattering blossoms at their feet as the bride and groom kiss.

Their daughters, five and three years old.

Extremities

I'm frugal. Well, I have to be. Old age is not kind to women living alone existing/subsisting on a "fixed" income. Some months are better than others when projects result in a cheque. Like recently. But I don't go crazy with the windfall.

First thing: I phone my hair stylist, Bernice, and my podiatrist, Aaron.

One thing I won't stint on are my extremities. I've had enough experience with really bad haircuts to know that if I pay peanuts I will get a monkey-head. So I go to this lovely old house in St. John's and let Bernice work her magic on my multi-coloured hair (since you ask, grey, brown, streaks of blonde and a titch of red). She has never, ever pushed colouring or products on me and is a perfectionist when it comes to cutting.

And yes, Aaron takes care of my feet. He's from the Channel Islands and does a fine job on my tootsies.

'Tis a fine thing indeed to stroll around the city under a perfect 'do, knowing your feet can take you anywhere without complaining.

Hold Still. Do Nothing.

One of those things that's hard to believe. I've always had dead straight hair. I envied my little sister's curls, the most curly hair you could possibly imagine. One of my daughters inherited it. Neither of Sister's daughters did. They got mine, straight and true. And then, yesterday morning, I wake up with curly hair. So many curls that at our annual card party last night everyone remarked on my "gorgeous perm". I didn't explain it wasn't a perm, as I knew it would sound like a lie but magic. It's still curly today. Me like. Lots.

My mind wanders down weird alleyways. I was wondering what would be the last smell of someone's life? It must be awful if you're in hospital and inhaling cabbage/antiseptic/urine/faeces/floor polish/bleach as your very last breath. Something so sad about that. When it should be lavender. The ocean spray. A good curry. Wild roses. A baby. I warned you I was weird.

I was out and about in a cardigan today so it looks like the freakish winter of last year is giving us a pass. Very mild, a few cold nights but on the whole back to our normally mild early winter. We usually don't get snow until February. Fingers crossed for a green December.

I was practising going around without any money on me. I know. Weird again. An experiment. And people, seriously, kept giving me money. I was asked over to a house as Commissioner of Oaths (I know, me, hysterical, right?) and the couple stuck $20 in my pocket for witnessing some papers. And then last night at the party, as everyone "knows I don't drink otherwise it would have been a bottle" I was given $50 as part of the card playing "profit-sharing" plan. The organizers have now converted the normal annual donation to the church as an annual benefit split amongst the card players. The RC church threw the seniors out on the street over a year ago when they closed the parish hall (land donated and built free by residents) and put it up for sale. We now have a new town hall, town owned and operated, a truly lovely space, and everyone is delighted. And next, this morning, the post mistress comes over from across the bay and buys 6 of my cards for $20. So within a day or two I have $90 without lifting a finger.

This could have something to do with my brand new curly head, you think? Magic.

Hair Today, Shorn Tomorrow

For those of us who loved the musical "Hair"

I wish I'd had a camera. To take pictures of the mountains of hair in the room. The Head Room that is. Voted # 1 hair salon in Canada at some point.

I gave this a lot of thought. And sought out no one else's opinion on this momentous change I was making to my own head. My hair was down to my waist and worn basically in a bun all the time. A bun is not conducive to walk training. And to wash this hair was beginning to aggravate me. Combing it out. Drying it. Not that the thickness was there anymore. I was losing my long hair at a really frightening rate. And the pins holding it up were hurting me.

So I mulled things over for about a week. And thought to myself, find an expert on older heads, pay the money - you old cheapskate you, and get a proper job done.

And I did. My original suggestion of wanting a Helen Mirren was met with disbelief but fortunately not with outright laughter. I can be sensitive. Squelch that fantasy under my left trainer. She requested I leave it to her. She hacked the first bunch of hair off me before she washed it. Customers and other staff (the Head Room is in a very old house in St. John's, full of fireplaces and nooks and crannies and staircases, I just love the place) visited the mounds of hair on the floor and gasped rather gratifyingly at what I had shed.

The end of the two hour session had me seriously admiring myself. I was delighted with my hair colour (no colour assists, we decided my natural colour was rather beautiful)and the cut was short, not too short, but completely manageable and falls nicely, thank you very much, even without blow-drying or painstaking styling for which I've never had the time or even a faint desire to make the time.

The very best, the absolute very best, was when I met a bunch of friends for dinner and when I walked into the pub they all went "Oh. My. God. - you've knocked 10 years off yerself!"

I'm obviously not quite ready to crone out just yet.

Donald Trump and I

There is one quality in Donald Trump I admire. Very much. And no, I am not taking the mickey or the piss out of him. Seriously. It's his hair. Or rather the way he feels about his hair.

I think it must be the world's longest comb-over. There's some that say it is down to his waist at night and in the morning has to be flipped under/over/under five or six times to make it rest so massively on top of his head. And sometimes the hair spray doesn't hold it all together and a wind takes it in twists and turns around his shoulders and leaves him with a high forehead; by high I mean it goes back to the crown of his head. And all this blondy-white growth then tumbles hither and yon around his neck. Publicly.

And no, I never laugh at him and his hirsute obsession. Because it takes enormous chutzpah to face the derision of the world. And to carry on, and on, and on with the incredible management of your hair in the face of such mockery. He knows how everyone feels and he bloody well carries on and he's a millionaire who could shave his head or wear a wig or get hair-plugs or even tattoo his skull.

It's like his hair is a beloved pet he is going to honour and respect and downright love. For ever.

What brought this on? you might well ask. Well I'm with The Donald on hair. I am the only woman I know over sixty who has long hair. People (usually other women) don't know what to make of me and it. Seriously. It can irritate them. Much like The Donald's crop.

Isn't it a nuisance? Yeah, sometimes.

It must kill you to shampoo it? Yeah, it's a bit of work alright.

Why don't you cut it? It's not time.

Now everything else about Mr. Trump I just about despise, his politics, his racism, his misogyny, his prejudices.

But he and I sing from the same songbook when it comes to our hair.

Invisible

It's official. I'm finally invisible. It took a while. Some tell me it happened to them when they turned some rancid corner in their mid-fifties. Some complain of it even when they're in their forties.

Well it happened to me yesterday. And it was painful. And I fought it every damn inch of the way. I'll refresh your memory of this dark and hopeless day in November. Yes, November 2010. It has taken over 4 months for the mess on my head to sort itself out. The scrabble of kinda hair at the back of my head lengthened once again (it was traumatized) and the black started to fade and I decided to let my grey or whatevers start rolling in. Au naturel pour moi. I chopped the side burns (long, dangly) at the side of my face a few times and twisted the other bits into things at the back of my head. I know, I speak like my hair was a rather large forest of mixed plantings but that's what it felt like.

So I toddle off to a new hair-stylist yesterday and let the whole mess down off my head, it is a little bit of a shock. I expected commiseration, laughter, even a snicker. But nothing from the bored gum-snapping ten year old hairdresser behind me.

"I have a bit of a mess here?" I say, smiling.

"What do you want done?"

"Well, I normally wear it like so, I hate it on my face, so if you could clean it up, even it out and recommend some sort of transition rinse while I let my natural colour roll in?"

"Don't know nothin' about that trans word. You want colour or not."

"No, no colour, but a rinse to harmonize...."

"Don't do what you call rinse," she snaps gum 2,000 times in irritation.

"Okay then. Just don't cut the back, it's growing in after 4 months, but cut everything else to match it, shame you don't have a rinse. I must be the only senior in Newfoundland, ha-ha?"

Silence, snip, clip, snip, clip. Snap gum.

"I like your hair colour, reminds me of my granddaughter's hair."

Silence.

"Is it natural?"

"No."

"It's a really nice colour."

Silence. She measures my hair carefully. Never meets my eyes in the mirror.

"I can hardly wait to have you fix up the terrible cut and colour I got the last time. Oh right, I'm stuck with piebald."

"You're not bald."

"I meant I'm stuck with the two-colour grow out."

"So now you want it coloured?" appalled silence, gum snapping ceases.

"No."

She dries my hair, I ask her to replace the barrette at the back. She sighs and deliberately twists it very tight. I know this as I see her face in the mirror as she does it.

She charges me too much. I tell her to give me the senior price. Huge, earth shaking, my-boyfriend-just-broke-up-with-me sigh as she redoes the bill.

I give her a $2.00 tip - a bit on the smallish side for me.

And you know why?

It's one of the best haircuts I ever had.

I'm a Stranger Here Myself

I got the hair 'done' yesterday. I don't know what happened. You know when something starts up outside of your control and like a runaway train you can't jump off, it is all going too fast?

That was me yesterday with a stylist I've used once before with pleasing results. This time it was different.

First it was the colour of the glop she foisted on my head and then it was all this hair cascading onto the floor. Masses of it. And then it was me with a black head and hair far too short in the back and a kind of curtain on each side of my ears.

I did express displeasure and was not assured with the words:

"Sure it'll all grow out and the black will fade to a really nice shade each time you wash it!".

Not yer standard reaction from a stylist surely? (Translated: This atrocious mess will fix itself when your hair decides to grow out but wash it a lot to overthrow this appalling colour that doesn't suit you one bit.)

I've never had black hair. It takes some getting used to.

Meantime every time I pass a mirror I jump. WTF? I say, Nasty little 'do on you!

I took it out today for an airing. I also packed my knitting to take my mind off it and distract others from focussing on my pale, pale face beneath my black, black hair.

Everyone was kind enough to just look at the knitting.

A remaining smidgin of vanity

Today was hair colouring day, I keep putting it off and hoping:

(a) the multicoloured hair of my youth returns
(b) a marvellous curly grey starts bursting through my scalp
or
(c)A silky swirl of white cascades softly down my back ready to be swept up into an elegant chignon.

Alas, none of these options have transpired so I am stuck with colouring my hair about every eight weeks. I really dislike the grizzledy grey/brown/blonde that my hair has turned in the life I have over the fence of sixty. Still very thick, my mother always said we each had enough for two heads and it is true. The hair gene manifests mainly through the female line. My father and his mother and his sisters had skinny sad hair and in my father's case it had just about vanished into a thin white circle of tonsure at the end.

None of the salons surrounding me are familiar with a non-chemical dye which is a frightening comment on the hair industry. Hairstylists believe in stripping and blasting every bit of old colour from the hair then applying bleaches and toxic colours to what's left after the first assault.Frightening. Any research shows that this type of arsenal on the head seeps through the skin and can cause brain tumours.

I buy my colouring in the local health store and it does a fine job. I go lighter than my own shade and at the end of the few painstaking hours it takes with a toothbrush I'm left with colouring that is quite natural.At least my doddery old eyes tell me so and that is good enough.

My little vanity, I have a few. Don't we all.

But surely there is room for an all natural hair salon in a city the size of Toronto?