Eminence Grise

I found my first gray hair when I was 16. I pulled it out. This was not a calculated gesture, nor was it motivated by distress. I pulled that single gray strand out because, at 16, I was sure it was a fluke.

I was wrong. I can’t say for certain whether two gray hairs grew back to replace the one I pulled, but from that moment of discovery, I have never seen my hair without “a silver thread.” So for me, going gray has never been a signpost of aging. In fact, it’s always added a certain je ne sais quoi to the image of my youth.

There’s a family tradition at work here. Stories abounded about my grandmother Ida’s rich auburn hair, although as long as I knew her she was completely gray. It happened overnight, I was told. She was in a car accident and hit her head. The next day the auburn hair was gone. And except for a blue rinse she sported for special occasions, the color of my grandmother’s hair, from age 20 until her death, was white.

Living in L.A. for the last 20 years, I’ve had my share of car accidents. But unlike my grandmother, I can credit my collisions with whiplash, agitation and insurance rate hikes, but not for turning my hair gray. Buried somewhere in the genetic equation that gave me thick brown hair was the biological clock that dictated longevity for the texture and forced early retirement on the color. So, I was prematurely gray. As was my mother and, with all due respect to family lore, my grandmother.

But unlike her immigrant mother, mine was modern. She colored her hair. I remember, as a girl, watching her as she methodically parted each section of her head to apply the dye, her white scalp taking on the dye’s dark color as she made sure to cover the budding gray roots. When her labors were done, she’d emerge from her bathroom still wearing the stiff plastic bib she’d used for the process, her wet hair, gleaming and dark as a raven’s, matted into a close-fitting black cap that covered her head.

And I, too, have hit the color bottle. In the ninth grade, I secretly peroxided my hair. In my 20s, it was henna. By my 30s, I’d become more daring and “stained” my hair “aubergine.” But this is where I stop being my mother’s daughter. For although I’ve indulged in alternative hues, I never colored my hair to cover the gray. This is not a point of honor for me. My forays into the world of hair color were never about honor, truth or any noble ideal. They stopped only when I became pregnant; hair coloring was a no-no then. After my children were born, I never returned to the coloring salon. Like most events in life, there was no agenda here; I just never got around to it. And when my hair grew in, seasoned with more salt than pepper this time around, for the first time in my life I had light hair. My gray was the closest I’d get to being a blond. And the color, as it did before, gave me pleasure, personal pleasure, having nothing to do with anyone else.

Until recently. Suddenly, I’m getting attention. From men. Women. Strangers in the street. And the attention I’m getting is not about the color I’m adding to my hair. It’s about the absence of color. It’s about the fact that I’m letting my hair go gray.

I should confess something. I have good hair. Its fullness and body were bequeathed to me by, yes, the grandmother with the auburn hair. But now that I’m a woman of a certain age, my hair has suddenly taken on a celebrity, and like all celebrity, it has nothing to do with me. It’s about aging. And aging is more than merely growing old in L.A. It’s the great secret. The unnameable. The thing that doesn’t happen to us--not here, anyway, and not publicly.

At first I was confused by what was happening. I went to the local Starbucks for my morning cappuccino, and as I opened the door to leave, a woman snagged me. “What do you do to your hair?” she asked passionately. I looked at her blankly. Most questions posed before 10 a.m. are difficult for me, but it was clear this woman was expecting an answer. Wanting to be obliging, I answered as best I could.

“I brush it.”

“No, who colors it?” she snapped impatiently. I realized then that this woman was not only referring to the color of my hair, she was assuming that no one would walk around with gray hair deliberately. It had to be because of something I’d done.

I’m not being coy or philosophical, just stating the obvious. Going gray in South Dakota may be part of the natural order of things, but here in the City of Eternal Youth it’s . . . unnatural. Aberrant. But the awful truth is that when my premature gray strands were joined, over time, by others that had earned their place, I liked the way my hair looked. Black and white. It matched with anything. It made it easy to dress. I had no thought that I was doing anything extreme. So it was a great surprise to realize that, whether I had intended it or not, my hair was making a statement.

“You’re so brave,” women come up to me and say, forcing me to ponder the definition of courage. “Don’t let anyone ever tell you to color your hair,” insists a man I don’t know in the supermarket. In the past, I’ve never been someone who drew comments from strangers. But there’s something about having gray strewn about my head that inspires people to speak. My hair holds a mirror up to them about how they feel about their own aging, their desirability--at home, in the world. It’s a touchstone. And seeing it, people start to talk--about their fears and wants, about husbands who insist that wives color their hair, about how if their hair could be gray like mine, they’d let it, but then again, they already feel like they’re older than everyone else. In these people’s eyes, I’m carrying a banner. It doesn’t matter that it’s one I never picked up. And depending on whom I meet, it waves with honor or defiance--against the crusade of time and the cultural assumptions that hold us in their grip. These exchanges have made me realize that having gray in my hair has become part of my identity, just as my name, my work and my family. What began as premature, in its full flowering near the front of my face, speaks of change and a life composed of now, as well as what came before--my original brown color--that asserts itself in the back of my head, where the waves of gray recede.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I lack vanity or that I’m ready to take on the role of dowager queen. I check in with my mirror the requisite amount of time to maintain my Southern California residency, and I don’t flinch at the mention of face-lifts. Moreover, there are those moments of reckoning when I look at myself and decide that highlights, lowlights, something different is in order--even with my kids’ claiming that I’d no longer be Mom without black and white hair, or my husband’s insistence that it’s sexy. Inevitably, though, I leave my house and have an anonymous hair encounter that’s so reaffirming that whatever provoked my need for a quick fix that day not only vanishes, but in its place I feel as though I’ve actually been hailed for doing something original (Whoa. Gray hair. What a concept!).

So what’s a girl to do? Am I providing a public service by remaining gray. Do I offer the L.A. masses a sigh of relief, secure that there’s someone they look younger than--moi? Or is my mother the only person who’s honest? “You’re so gray,” she says, like clockwork, upon arriving for a visit. “You should really color your hair.” In a photo of of us seated next to each other, I’m the one with the swath of gray. With the help of her colorist, my mother’s hair, once black, now has the same auburn color as my pre-car accident grandmother’s.

It’s difficult to redefine an aesthetic sensibility, particularly one so entrenched that it seems eternal. Youth is beauty. Beauty is youth. Shining silver tresses have no place here. But experience has a way of revealing itself, no matter what the hair color. And I’ve found I prefer the humility of that experience to the arrogance of my brown-haired youth. So when I look at that photograph of my mother and me, I don’t mourn time’s passing. The two women smiling out from the picture bear witness to life. And what I see is beautiful.

So I’m keeping the gray. Maybe in doing it, I am exhibiting grace under pressure. Maybe I’m actually daring. Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s never too late to re-embrace the past. I can always hit the bottle.