Hair! What a kerfuffle humans make of hair, as I wrote last year when it was all falling out. A week ago I went for my first haircut since what, December 2012? I regretted having even one of the precious dears trimmed, after the daily effort I’ve expended urging them to grow. But when hair comes back, it’s like baby hair, all different lengths, which encourages wild disarray. Still, it’s all curly-wild and probably will be until there’s enough weight and clipped ends to settle it down. It’s as thick as ever, for which I’m eternally grateful.
And then there’s the issue of color. When it started going gray years ago, I started having it touched up. Gradually “touching up” became a euphemism. Still, I wanted some gray showing, a signal that I wasn’t really trying to look young, I guess. Hair is the flag of our disposition. A signal. We say all sorts of things with it. “Keep it looking like I’m going gray,” I told my hairdresser, who devised a technique of painting the color through, leaving strands uncolored. The idea was to be “going gray” forever. 
But behold, here I am, my exact self in its exact color! A really nice steely gray, like my father’s (He has more white now that he’s 95). I’ve been contemplating this—gray or not gray?—for a while now. I feel good in gray. I am, after all, the age for it. My hair matches the rest of me. However, you can say all you want about gray being elegant, signaling wisdom, whatever, but basically, for those who don’t yet have gray hair, the gray-headed ones are dismissed as somehow no longer “counting” in the contemporary whirl. I think I used to feel that way.
Will I leave it gray? I have no idea. It’s a joy to see at last what it really-really looks like. Remember when I said it was interesting to see my bald head—most of us (the lucky ones) go a lifetime without ever seeing what our bare scalp looks like. Color-wise, I might have gone for a bunch more years before I gave up the illusion of a younger me. I would have, eventually—I’ve noticed when one is 80 or so, dark hair tends to look harsh.
For now and maybe forever, I’m liking this gray. I’m liking not wearing a wig. I’ve been grateful to have that absolutely perfect wig, for sure. It’s made the whole chemo-radiation process much less miserable, to be able to go shopping and not have people’s eyes change to what seems like a mixture of sympathy and separation (“Thank God it’s not me”). But speaking of separation—all the time wearing the wig, all the time coloring my hair, there’s a sense of disguise. Dramatically so, with the wig, only slightly, with the color.
Jerry says, “Do you feel inauthentic wearing contacts, eye makeup?” No. “So,” he says, “why would you feel that way about coloring your hair?” Maybe the difference is this: cosmetics don’t disguise anything; they just enhance. Color on gray hair is a disguise.
Nothing evil in that. Whatever makes us feel good when we look in the mirror is just fine in my book. I don’t feel any particular nobility in choosing not to color. A large percentage of women color their hair—look in the hair-color aisle at the drugstore! I don’t know whether I’ll stay gray, but I can feel a kind of settling in my body/mind as I look in the mirror. Yes, this is me. This is me, aging. I’ve caught up with myself. 
So far, not a word about writing in this post. I’m having a heck of a time getting anything written. A lot going on here, Jerry’s back surgery, Christmas, Jerry’s recovery routines. And so on. So, my beloved husband said to me, “You’ve written so much over the years, you have so many books and awards (he lays it on thick), you could never write another word and still have had a successful life as a writer. I’m not sure why you feel you MUST press onward.”
“You still don’t get it?” I respond tenderly. “What I’ve written doesn’t matter. What there is to be written this day, this moment, is what matters. Stuff is unshaped that needs to be shaped, that wants to try to fit, awkwardly or not, into words.” Well, I probably wasn’t that coherent.
I’m reading Ann Patchett’s collection of essays, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. She describes the unwritten novel as a glorious butterfly. You can watch it flutter for years if you wish. But to actually get it written, you have to smash the butterfly, the dream of the perfect novel, and try to build back something only somewhat like it by slogging through muck. “If you want to write,” she says, “practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish, but because you want to learn to write well, because there is something only you can say.”
At this moment I’m also thinking this about the gray hair, too. There is no one else who’s me. It makes some kind of sense to be exactly this. 
I put several photos of me here, so you'll recognize me next time you see me.