Baby, Come Back!

I share a hair colorist with Jennifer Aniston. That's right. Once a month, Michael Canale treks to D.C. from Beverly Hills with his special formulas in tow to treat the otherwise deprived women of the nation's capital, 99.99 percent of whom prefer to be blond. But far from feeling that I was pampering myself amidst all the iced skinny lattes and salon chit-chat when I was there last week, I was thinking, I can't f------ believe that I am using up 4 1/2 precious hours and not a little money to cover the gray hairs on my head, which, lately, seem as plentiful as the mosquitoes in our backyard. It's no surprise that we live in a youth culture, although you'd think that all the baby boomers might put up a fuss about having to keep up with the Joneses' grandchildren. That night, when I mentioned to my mom that I might have to rethink the whole hide-the-gray concept in order to put my time and money to better use, she, who went salt-and-pepper when she was 39 and has stayed that way since, said, "You'll change your mind."

I was thinking about all this today when I came across Clever Girl Goes Blog by a 27-year-old hairdresser named Tia, who writes that "the idea of turning twenty-seven very nearly caused me to hyperventilate on a daily basis." Clever Girl is referring to her first sighting of middle age--for her a speck on the horizon viewed from a distant, distant shore. 

But as someone who has beached her craft there, I can say that Clever Girl is onto something. Aging isn't about one big thing--it's a thousand tiny injustices like waking up to find that your eyelids have drooped or that the mild salsa at the local Mexican joint is too HOT! For Clever Girl, it's how "it's Tuesday!" is no longer enough motivation to party.

In the land I now inhabit, party is a noun, not a verb, and it's usually associated with sticky children and goody bags containing little sponges that don't open up into pirates the way they're supposed to when they're put in water. 

But Clever Girl is onto something, because just this morning I realized that the desire to be young does not just strike the nearly old. That's when Sam, who turned six last week, said he wished he could be one again and still in the first grade. If he could have articulated it, I think he was trying to say something about dialing back the clock but keeping the hard-won wisdom of his years.