Change of Color

I loved autumn as a child. The turning of the leaves coincided with the joy I felt being back at school, learning new things, reading new books, and getting to know new teachers and classmates. For me, it was the start of things rather than the beginning of the end. The crisp air and cold puddles hinted at what was to come.

The leaves are at their peak, and they are as lovely as ever. The changing of the seasons helps me remember that all things change even when they feel static as lead weights. Knowing change is part of the life cycle keeps me hopeful.

A year ago I began what I imagined was the painful process of growing the dye out of my hair and letting it turn to its natural color. I had dyed my hair since the age of 38 and now I am 57, so I had no idea just how much or how little gray would come in. I imagined walking around with a skunk stripe and being judged harshly by anyone caring to notice. I wore hats most of the winter, and that helped the transition go smoothly. I strategically lopped off hair, not too short, as it caused Ronald anxiety, but enough to speed the process. A year later, my transformation is complete.

I love my steel gray hair mixed liberally with dark brown strands. It is beautiful. Instead of being judged as old or ugly, I’ve been stopped countless times and told how lovely my hair is. One young woman asked if I’d had it dyed that way, and I gave her my shy smile and said, “Just the opposite. I’ve let it go natural.”

“It’s so beautiful,” she said.

Ronald, supportive but slightly anxious about my penchant for impulsivity, declared my natural hair as beautiful as he remembered it and stated, as if we had not discussed it in depth many times, that he knew it all along.

Nature knows how to put colors together just like those autumn leaves, so why do we try to second-guess it?

*****

We early voted this week. The poll was not too crowded. We waited less than ten minutes. I was surprised to see a constitutional amendment up for vote. The last one we voted on in 2012, the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman, was effectively called unconstitutional by the SCOTUS. Of course, Thom Tillis, Speaker of the State Legislature, who is running against Senator Kay Hagan, is hiring outside counsel at taxpayers’ expense to defend the amendment. I call it beating a dead horse. I’m hoping his campaign ends up dying, too, in spite of the Koch brothers’ money funding it.

The new amendment is stated as follows: “Constitutional amendment providing that a person accused of any criminal offense for which the State is not seeking a sentence of death in superior court may, in writing or on the record in court and with the consent of the trial judge, waive the person’s right to a trial by jury.”


Read more here: Charlotte Observer

North Carolina is apparently the only state that requires a trial by jury for defendants facing felony charges. But, hey, it’s North Carolina, and after reading the amendment, I chose to vote no. Walking back to the car after voting, Ronald and I talked about it. We both came to the conclusion that coercion might be a tactic for saving money on jury trials and to ensure the outcome wanted whether it is justice or injustice. The Charlotte Observer, in the article linked above, noted that attorneys might sway judges through campaign contributions and other methods. The history here is too awful to be ignored.

Because it’s campaign season again, I am angry and tired by the hate ads in the media. Our phone rings constantly, I open my email to see hundreds of pleas for money, and the mailbox is stuffed with flyers. I understand the urgency, and I get information from both parties because I have written to my representatives and, even if I am in disagreement, I end up on their mailing lists.

I am offended by the GOP’s courting of women and minorities even though they do not and will not have our interests in mind. Do they really think we are that stupid?

Halloween hasn’t helped with Internet photos of white people in blackface, decorations that depict lynching, and the articles written about them. Privilege of the few is exhausting for everyone else on the other side. It’s also dangerous and sometimes fatal.

Then I can’t face it anymore. I don’t want to talk or write about it. I am too angry and too offended by the news and reports. I wish it would just go away. But there it is, every single day, with millions of people pretending it doesn’t exist.

I guess that’s why I still get excited when I vote. I think about the people who waged battles and the ones who lost their lives to ensure women and blacks could vote, and I want to both honor those who sacrificed and also feel like my vote can make a difference. I’m not sure it makes a difference, but if we don’t try, what is left to do?

Today as I finish this post a cold rain pelts the colorful leaves and they drop to the ground, one or many at a time. The trees are turning barren and gray. I can feel the chill in my bones, and I’m voting for the sun to appear, but I know my vote will not count in this case.

But nature makes the colors work and gives me hope for the change I know will come.

More Gray Matters

It’s the time of year when I can’t get up in the mornings and I don’t want to go to bed at night until sleep finally finds me which is often well after midnight. I’m restless and glum. Not that winters down here in NC are anything close to what they are in NY where I spent the first 50 years of my life. This winter in upstate NY is a constant barrage of sub-zero temperatures and blustery snowstorms. We had our storm in NC, sure. A few inches of snow and everything was shut down for days. The trash was not picked up, the mail was not delivered, and the snowplows didn’t arrive until the sun had done most of their job of clearing the streets.

I didn’t mind the time spent indoors. I like my solitude. It’s the short days and the reminder that mortality comes to all living things that has walloped my resoluteness.

I suppose that should make me hopeful because some of the crazy ideologies circulating the media these days have taken on a life of their own. Their impending demise should be cause for a premature celebration. Yet I can’t arouse the energy for even one “hoorah.”

I feel anger brewing beneath the surface when I think about recent deaths, like the murder of Jordan Davis because one drunk guy carrying a gun decided he and his friends were playing their music too loudly, and how certain people continue to get away with murder because gun companies want to sell more guns and they don’t care what they are used for. They know what they are used for. They convince legislatures to pass vague “stand your ground” and “shoot first” laws as if owning a gun is a more important freedom than the freedoms of safety and place. Every American has the right to go to the store, wear a hoodie, play music, sit in an SUV, buy Skittles at a convenience store, and walk home in the rain. Not just white Americans. Not just wealthy Americans.

That includes being confident of being served if one goes to a restaurant to eat dinner or to a dry cleaner to drop off clothes. Why should one be turned away if one has the money to purchase the service? Oh, excuse me, religious freedom. Did I forget that one? Religious freedom is the freedom to worship as one chooses, not the freedom to force one’s beliefs on another or choose not to serve those you believe don’t share your religious beliefs. Your service to someone who is gay or a different ethnicity or race is not considered abetment if that’s how you see it. Conservative Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed the bill, but that hasn’t stopped other states from considering a similar law.

I feel the burden of mankind on my shoulders.  I can’t shake it this time of year. It’s the feeling that some things never change. Like the “isms” will never truly go away and that mankind can’t help but be corrupted by power and wealth. It’s depressing.

I sought diversion and turned on TCM in time to catch the 1940 movie Hullabaloo, about a has-been radio actor who turns to his three daughters, children of three different wives, to revive his career. It starred two actors from the Wizard of Oz: Frank Morgan and Billie Burke, so it captured my attention. A black actor playing the role of bellhop sang two beautifully rendered songs: Carry Me Back to Old Virginny and Vesti la Giubba from I Pagliacci.

I searched the cast listing to see who the man was as I couldn’t recall ever seeing him in a movie before, and I’ve seen many, many movies from the 1940s and 1950s, two of my favorite movie eras.

His name was Charles Holland. He had roles in just three movies, one role minor enough where it was not credited. My search for more information resulted in no photos, no wiki page, and no full bio on him. The only other tidbit was that he died at age 77 in Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Netherlands.

That news made me sad, too. Despite my love of movies from that era, I acknowledge that the lives portrayed in Hollywood were, and mostly still are, white lives. The movies were in black and white, but the actors, with the exception of certain roles like maid, slave, butler, or bellhop, were white, and the stories were based in white cultural mores.

That started to change in the late 1950s when America’s social conscience awakened and movies like Sidney Poitier’s The Defiant Ones came out in 1958. Of course, it was one more push toward equality that never truly came to fruition. I just read about the “hullabaloo” caused by the casting of Michael B. Jordan as one of the Fantastic Four in the next sequel of the franchise. The movie remake of Annie awakened a few racists. One tweeted: They're redoing the Annie movie and making the little girl black. The fuck gonna be going on next? A black snow white????

Some fans can’t picture the characters Annie and Johnny Storm as African Americans so, in alignment with what white privilege affords to those who have it, they have made their dissatisfaction known with great trumpeting and fanfare. I am sorry their imaginations are stunted.

Yes, it’s exhausting, maddening, and outrageous, but I can’t give it up. Instead, after dwelling on it until I can’t any longer, I allow myself those diversions, another one being obsessing about my hair, a symptom of another ism.

I’ve been growing out my dyed hair since October 2013. It’s a slow process, even for my quickly growing hair, and one that is becoming more painful, though I retain my excitement of reaching the goal of accepting myself just as I am. You can read my first two installments at: Gray Matters and Matters: Gray and Otherwise.

Though I am resolute in my decision, I still feel the sting of envy as my friends continue to dye and cover their gray hairs. There is an invisible, self-imposed pressure to conform to the standard of beauty that frowns upon natural hair.

One day in the car, I turned down the visor and stared at myself in the mirror. “My hair looks terrible,” I lamented as I ran my fingers through it. The stripe is growing larger but, as the demi-permanent dye fades, it is not the defined stripe I originally imagined and that permanent hair color makes.

“Yeah, it does,” Ronald responded with the truthfulness I appreciate even when it hurts. “I liked your hair short before,” he continued, “and then you grew it long.”

I smiled because a few months ago he had put forth the argument that I shouldn’t go short. “Well, I guess I would have been almost bald if I had cut it when I first started to grow it out. Maybe it would work now.”

“Yes,” he replied.

Not quite yet, though. I think I need to go a little longer before I chop.

Here I am with my boy Ru. We will share similar hair color when I am all done.

Now I am sitting in our dark and unheated living room typing the rest of this post before the battery on my Mac dies. Another polar vortex hit NC yesterday. We woke up this morning to no electricity and no heat. The trees were bending to the ground by the weight of the ice coating their branches, and the window screens on the eastern side of the house were frozen over. It didn’t seem so bad in the daylight while my Nook and Mac still had battery power.

When I realized my Nook would not last too much longer, I picked up a trade paperback I’ve been meaning to read titled Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom. After a few pages I got that excitement I get when I want to share with Ronald, so I started reading aloud, as I often did in college, either to him or into a tape recorder for Ray, who was visually handicapped. I read from the Harriet Tubman book for almost two hours, until my voice began to give way.

We ended up at the movies, because they had power. Then we went to dinner. We relaxed at the table until we saw lots of people crowding the lobby. We drove toward home through this block that had lights and that block that didn’t. We arrived to the still darkened neighborhood, our house cloaked in darkness. Ronald has wandered into the bedroom, and here I sit finishing up this post before the Mac goes dead.

It’s another diversion in a world of gray matters.

This is what it looked like off my front porch.

Matters: Gray and Otherwise

Phil Robertson of the A&E show Duck Dynasty was quoted in GQ as saying:

“Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men. Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”

He also made the following comment about the pre-Civil Rights era:

“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field.... They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”

Read more at Huffington Post.

He was briefly suspended from the show, but viewer outrage made A&E think again, and he has been reinstated. Free speech, his supporters cried.

Yes, free speech, but free speech for those who oppose his messages as well. Why is it that members of the far right can say whatever they want, including blatant lies about our President with their birther conspiracy, but their opposition is not allowed to respond, factually or otherwise, or the individuals will be charged with trampling on freedoms? On paper our freedoms are for all Americans; in reality, they are for a sub-group of Americans, like the wealthy, or conservative Christians, or Constitutionalists who really only believe in a couple of amendments interpreted in their favor, or, as my husband and I often discuss, for white Americans but not for Americans of color.

We have to keep fighting for equality and to protect the freedoms of all Americans or we all stand to lose. 

I’ve written about the trend of reality shows that represent rural white culture, poverty, and fundamental conservative values in my post The Honey Boo Boo Effect.

I think we should be respectful of all American sub-cultures. We truly are a diverse country, and our diversity should be reflected in the media and in our government representatives. But that respect includes not spreading hateful and discriminatory rhetoric about other groups. And there should be equal representation in the media. Don’t glorify one sub-culture at the expense of another.

Of course, money drives everything. A&E knows Duck Dynasty is one of their top moneymakers, and that is what drove them to reinstate Robertson. Besides, the network knew what it was getting when they took on the show. They like the drama it causes.

Reality TV is getting wearisome but I am not sure we are near the end of its run. Our sense of reality has gotten fuzzy. Social engineering by the conservative base and the wealthy (like the Koch brothers) is frightening, and it is taking us backwards at a pace I find alarming. We need to be proactive, vigilant, and progressive.

#####

I want to abolish whiteness in 2014. I never felt white anyway. I was that Italian kid with the odd Australian mother. I was one of the poor kids and I didn’t get to experience the things middle class white children did with regularity: vacations, summer camp, bicycles under the Christmas tree, and new clothes rather than hand-me-downs.  I called myself a mutt, but I never felt ashamed of my mixed ethnicity.

As an adult in an interracial marriage with mixed race adult children, I abhor what white represents and the way politicians and the media use it to further divide us. Whiteness does not exist anymore than blackness exists. It is a socially engineered concept designed to oppress people of color and award privilege to “colorless” people.

I am tired of this devil

I am tired of this stuff

I am tired of this business

Sewn when the going gets rough

I ain't scared of your brother

I ain't scared of no sheets

I ain't scared of nobody

Girl, when the goin' gets mean

Protection for gangs, clubs, and nations

Causing grief in human relations

It's a turf war on a global scale

I'd rather hear both sides of the tale

See, it's not about races, just places, faces

Where your blood comes from is where your space is

I've seen the bright get duller

I'm not going to spend my life being a color

~ Michael Jackson: Black or White

Let’s make a pledge to celebrate who we really are, because we are all ethnic, we are all diverse, and we are all human. We have to agree that equality is more than just tolerance. It is more than just announcing we are all equal. It is much more than telling victims of oppression that racism is dead and they are the ones perpetuating it. It is more than claiming some groups don't deserve equality and then blame them for their circumstances.

There is much hard work to be done. Let's work together to get rid of the concept of white and the oppositional concept of black. We don't need anymore divisiveness.

My family is racially and ethnically mixed and we come in all shades of skin tone, but none of us is the socially constructed "white" or "black." (Photos taken at Cara and Mackenzie's first and second birthday parties) 

#####

I am on another journey first touched on in my post Gray Matters. I promised updates. Here is the first.

I last dyed my hair in October 2013.  It’s been about three months now and the growth of my natural color, a very pale gray or nearly white, is showing. I bought five hats of various styles and gotten many compliments about how nice they look, but I bought them to cover the growing skunk stripe.

Recently Ronald told me that while he liked the hats (he tried for years to get me to wear them but I always feared “hat hair”), he really liked how my gray was coming in. He said it looked purposeful, as if I had planned it. He’s helped me to be unafraid to face the world with my growing stripe.

I am sure part of the seemingly easy transition is because I used demi-permanent instead of permanent hair color. The color is fading all over except at the ends where it is very concentrated. So streaks of gray are showing through all of my hair, not just at the hairline or part.

I’m starting to enjoy the color of my natural hair. I don’t feel it has aged my appearance one bit. I put to rest the horrible discrepancy between what I look like and what society expects me to look like and how awful it made me feel.

It’s another pledge I am making for 2014. Will you join me? No more societal judgments and pressures that make women feel insecure about their appearance. At fifty-six I am pleased with my appearance and that I am healthy and fit. What could be sexier than confidence? Ronald has noticed!

My hair has grown quite a bit since I cut it to my shoulders in November. It's always grown quickly.

####

2013 was a difficult year for me. I lost my beloved father-in-law, a man whose life deserves celebration, and I had two painful surgeries to get the bones of my feet corrected so I will regain stability when walking.

It wasn’t a stellar year for the progress of our country either, as we witnessed the least effective Congress in history, the GOP and Tea Party smear campaign of the Affordable Care Act, the war on women, the war on the poor, and the war on workers. The ACA rollout had its own set of problems, but as far as I am concerned, being someone who works with databases, I expected a rocky start with the site. It was a huge undertaking.

Now we can look forward to 2014 with the hope that things will only get better. Perhaps we can even look at the prospects of reinstating long-term unemployment for the millions of people still looking for work and of raising the minimum wage and working toward income equality.

Happy New Year, dear readers! Life is not a straight journey but one that takes course over many roads: some beaten flat by many feet, some rarely traveled, some full of seemingly insurmountable obstacles and painful realities, some that seem to lead nowhere, but none not worth the taking. Enjoy the journey.

Gray Matters

I run my fingers through my hair as I stare into the bathroom mirror, and there it is, the gray beneath the dark brown, the truth beneath the lie.  Many people think I look young for 56, but would they say the same thing if they saw the true color of my hair?

This is what my hair looks like when I lift it up. See that gray?

A few weeks ago, I got tired of the lie. I had thoughts of chopping off my two-foot-long hair and going with a pixie cut. Growing out gray is not easy. The infamous skunk stripe lies as much as dyed hair does. Maybe it shouts, “I don’t care about my looks,” or “I’m too cheap to cover my gray,” or “I am sickly,” or “I am old, and it doesn’t matter anymore.” I don’t think it would ever announce, “I’ve taken control of my emotions, and I am not ashamed to be me.”

This is what the world sees.

Ronald and I talked about my hair. We’ve talked about it a lot over the years during complicated, emotionally wrought discussions. How can they not be when each cares so deeply for the wellbeing of the other and yet has needs that also require attention?

Ronald, an artist, has captured me in photos, in oil, in plaster, and in the love letters he sent to me when I had to return to Albany for the first two summers after we met freshman year of college. Most men are visual when it comes to attraction to the opposite sex, but there is an aesthetic that further defines Ronald’s attraction. Flawless skin of certain hues that range from palest white to deepest brown but share a certain luminescence of tone. Large eyes, downturned mouth, and a small chin are other features that speak to him, as do a tiny waist, shapely legs and hips, and small breasts of a certain, perfect shape. I can see a woman with those features and know before he does that his head will track in her direction.

I don’t feel threatened by his looking, but validated.

I’m a feminist. I have been since I can remember. I want equal status. I want a career. I want to earn my own keep and not be someone’s property. I don’t want to be sexually objectified. I want equality in my marriage where I can contribute as an equal partner. My beliefs make my strong feelings about my hair and my tolerance of Ronald’s visual attractions seem out of place. My need for validation seems antithetical.

Yet they exist inside me, clashing and melding at once, seeming like a good mix that lends balance to the whole.

So after we had talked about my hair for the umpteenth time these last few years, I decided definitively to go gray, as if it is a journey to a destination. Part of what made it so definitive is that I’m having surgery at the end of the month on one of my feet, and hope to have the other foot done next month. It’s a huge undertaking that includes breaking and resetting bones. Painful, I’ve heard, but worth it, after bones shift and grow crooked and render one unstable while walking or standing. A welcome life change, so why not clean up all the things that are disabling?

Ronald agreed. I’ve been dyeing my hair since I was in my mid-thirties. He had been against it then. He loved the color of my hair, a mixture of browns, reds, golds, and the occasional grays, so much that he couldn’t imagine changing it. He didn’t think a bottle could ever capture the beauty he saw.

“If you dye a single hair on your head, I’ll know,” he averred.

I dyed it anyway. The hairdresser used a semi-permanent dye, very close to my real color. It took Ronald six months to notice. After that he was good with it. Close enough, I suppose.

Twenty years later, the ruse is tiring.  First it was every 8 weeks, then 5 weeks. Now I go every 4 weeks, and, even then, I feel anxious after week 3. Over the years I’ve gone from semi-permanent, to permanent, to demi-permanent after the permanent hair color nearly ruined my hair with its harsh chemicals.

I used to perm my hair in order to give it the body that fine, straight hair is lacking. Lots of people thought the unnaturally curly hair suited my Italian ethnicity. I guess curly hair is expected on a woman whose maiden name is Liuzzi, but I had to give up the perms in order to color – too many chemicals, my hairdresser up in Syracuse told me. It seemed a grand sacrifice at the time, but I’ve grown to enjoy my fine, straight hair, and I don’t miss the bottled curls.

Ronald and I celebrating our marriage. My hair is permed, not dyed, in this photo taken when I was twenty-six. 

Now I’m wondering if I will miss my “coffee bean” colored hair or if I will soon wonder why I ever stopped nature from taking its course.

I wanted to find out quickly what I thought about my real color. Hence my thought of “chopping it all off.” Hair grows back, after all, and mine grows quite quickly. One daughter, Cara, the one with very short hair, applauded my choice. The other, Mackenzie, the one with hair to the middle of her back, was silent.

I texted my hairdresser: “Don’t bother buying dye. Don’t freak out, but I want you to cut my hair short, a la Cara, as I decided to go gray.” She immediately dialed Cara to see if I had lost my mind.

At the bathroom mirror a week ago, I looked at Ronald using the straight razor to trim his salt and pepper mustache and beard, and I said, as I applied makeup, “Say good-bye to my hair. This time next week, I’m chopping it all off so I can skip the skunk stripe.”

He held the razor poised in the air as my statement sunk in. He said nothing then, but later that evening he said a lot.

“I support you going gray,” he said, “but I don’t understand why you want to cut your hair, too.”

‘The skunk stripe,” I said. It was so obvious to me. I couldn’t believe he didn’t get it.

“How bad can it be? It seems more drastic to do both.” Will he feel that way when his growing bald spot cries out for a total buzz? I’ve promised to let him know when it is time.

I had been so sure. I had photos on my laptop of cuts I thought would look good. Of course, they were on women all 30 years younger than I. When I drudged up a photo of Judi Dench sporting her pixie cut, I shuddered and promptly deleted it.

One of the photos I saved on my laptop so I could show my hairdresser how I wanted my hair cut short.

Here is Judi Dench. I think she is stunning but maybe I am not ready to admit that I look closer to her age than the age of the model above.

The next day I texted my hairdresser again, telling her I needed other suggestions because Ronald was emotional about the thought of short hair and going gray at the same time.  I respect his need to take one step at a time.

We had a text conversation, my hairdresser making suggestions such as highlighting, and I texting to say I’d think about it and finally suggesting I’d like her to cut my hair to the tops of my shoulders.

Yesterday Cara and I showed up for our appointments, and, as I sat in the chair, my hairdresser ran her hands through my hair, and the three of us talked about it.

“You are about 100% gray in front, about 50% at the crown, and a lot less in the back.  You won’t really know what it looks like until you grow it out.”

“I know,” I said.

Cara thought my new cut was adorable even with a luminescent crown of gray around the edge and through the part.

Ronald still hasn’t said a word about it, but sometimes that’s how we communicate in our equal partnership, through silence. It isn’t a condemnation; it’s a slow adjustment to change, not at all out of character. I've stunned him into silence on more than one occasion in our almost 40 years together, oftentimes with a dramatically different hair cut and just once with the announcement that we were having twins. I sit comfortably in the pocket of that silence, knowing that I am validated and he and I will be just fine even when the skunk stripe takes up residence on my head.

Let the skunk stripe begin! More on my journey to gray in future posts.