Gray Matters

I was sitting in my car the other day, shaving for the second time in a row in my rear view mirror in the middle of the woods, when I pondered the single threads of white curling through my multi-Fall-colored facial hair. I thought back to October 2000. Nikolai and I were entering the 2nd month and final week of our meandering road trip out of Holden Village and along the 49th parallel of North America. In his native Milwaukee, we had borrowed a compact blue car to drive down to Illinois to see my family. In Chicago, heading for the Shedd Aquarium and therefore stuck in thick traffic, we had time to evaluate our ever-growing mountain manliness. Long beards framed each of our faces, begging for a comb, his a golden blond with white and mine a mysterious hodge-podge. So, on the sunlit gray dashboard of the borrowed blue car, we plucked and placed curly two inch long beard hairs one at a time, arranging them according to their place on the color spectrum. My contribution included midnight black, dark brown, just plain brown, light brown, red, straw blond, and barely-yellowed white. "Cool," we agreed, and moved on with our day.

Now, after two years of grad school, some of those seven colors have decided to usher in a new color. Let's call it ghost-white. And since September, an increasing number of those original colors have kindly given up their original identities and joined the ghost-white team. I'm writing this to show appreciation for my facial hair which has been growing with me since I first shaved it the fall of 1987 just after my 13th birthday. But I'm also writing to celebrate with tongue in cheek (my left cheek, where all the ghost-white friends hang out) and to welcome this eighth and final color. In the end, I'm writing to own my growing age, which up to this point had always been a building-up process and which now stares me in the face every day. It's inevitable, weird, yet a right of passage and therefore worth a write. I love my beard and its eighth color. And for those who know me very well, you won't think that a blog post about hair is weird at all, will you?