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By Suzanna Hicks
This has been an interesting year and, although it’s embarrassing to admit--it’s all about the hair. Oh great! How uninspired and predictable. Here is an opportunity to express something creatively and hopefully intelligent about aging and what do I focus on? Gray hair! The truth is that for years I have observed beautiful women--inclusive of those my age and younger--who have let their hair go “natural.” To admit frankly that I notice women with silver or white hair, while rarely paying much attention to the guys only signifies a narcissistic instinct since I am, after all, a woman. Ironically it was a man – sadly long deceased – who convinced me to take the plunge into a final and joyful abandonment of the mess and expense of monthly dying. Charlie Chaplin, the one and only, incomparable clown of the silent film era, was pre-maturely gray and apparently it didn’t slow him down one bit. With the technological wonders of film and photography, today we can view with delight Chaplin’s “dyed” look in Modern Times (1936) right alongside his “natural” look at the time.
If this twentieth-century icon could, as a young man, proudly let his hair go natural before a worldwide audience, why should I hesitate to do so in the confines and obscurity of my own life? Right? So one day I just stopped buying hair color, went out and got my hair cut, and then consciously left the overtly white roots… well, white. No fireworks went off, no wrecks on the highway occurred (due to my hair, that is); life just went on as usual.
It wasn’t long though before people around me began to comment on the change in my appearance. Admittedly almost all the comments were 1) from other women, and 2) complementary. I can think of one humorously surprised expression from a male who had not seen me in awhile and he merely blurted out: “New ‘do?” But overall, the decision not to color my hair impacted my life very little, other than some nice comments from co-workers and acquaintances here and there.
Until a few months ago, that is. It happened almost imperceptibly and took me by surprise. I am a non-traditional university student and have been slowly working on an undergraduate degree for several years. Admittedly I have been self-conscious about the discrepancy in age between myself and the majority of other students from day one for (coherent, if not ideal) reasons, such as regret for lost time and opportunities. “If only I had earned a degree twenty years ago…..” (Can you hear the violins in the background?) Alternatively I have experienced the freedom of really enjoying the academic experience from a different perspective and time in life than the majority of my classmates. I am “loving it” as the McDonald’s commercial says. But I’ve noticed something strange has happened this year. Now, with a headful of gray (as opposed to rosewood - dark auburn brown) hair, I am more overtly noticed in the classroom as being an “older” student. Knowing full well that no intentional malice existed, here are just two examples that made me mildly uncomfortable.
In a recent drama class I was tentatively cast in a small play in the role of a “mother.” I cannot remember if I actively participated in that decision, but the fact remains that it was a highly natural, assumed role for me to engage in. A severe case of self-consciousness hijacked my successful fulfillment of the role (Chaplin would have been disgusted!) and a talented young student stepped in to play the mother admirably. But it was eye-opening and a little mortifying to experience for the first time an assumed demarcation of roles like that.
The second occurrence took place a few weeks ago in a communication class. We conducted a purposely inoffensive, yet educational experiment on stereotypical assumptions. As the gray-haired person in class, I was picked as the most likely to love to cook. Anyone who knows me would die of laughter at that notion because I can barely boil water without burning it. The extent of my cooking skills involves making toast and that’s not even always successful. Of course, the case could be made that it was more the fact that I was an older woman as opposed to the gray hair, specifically. But still…. It was just weird.
By now the readers of this little essay may think I am a most superficial individual. Spending mental energy and space on something as shallow as outward appearance is as boring as it is crude. We know better in this day and age. If you’re beginning to guess that I’m playing the so-called devil’s advocate, you’re right. The whole point of this exercise is to grapple honestly with the question of what aging means to me, personally, at this point in my own particular life and in the context of this 21st century, where in many ways, the whole world is trying to live – and more poignantly, trying to stay young – forever.
I wanted to enter this creative writing contest back in 2005, when my father was dying of liver cancer at the age of seventy. But that was an essay about dying well, not aging well, and it was emotionally impossible to write. Shortly after my father passed, and in the midst of grief, I discovered the films of Charlie Chaplin and the subject of age took on a breathtaking quality in my private inner world. It didn’t take long at all, thanks to the combined wonders of Amazon.com, Netflix, and the generosity of an international Chaplin scholar at the University of Arkansas to enjoy the full range of Chaplin’s art from the time he was a very young man to a gentleman in his late eighties. As he matured and grew, so did his art. The slap-stick comedy of the early Keystone Cops era eventually transformed into the biting satire of The Great Dictator and the richly textured poignant story of the aging clown in Limelight. Today we can take it all in and enjoy it in one swoop. If someone were to ask which Chaplin – the young or the old – I prefer, I couldn’t answer because there is no real distinction. Just as I have difficulty distinguishing memories of my father as a young man from that of him as an old man. He was the same person, just struggling and enjoying different things at different phases of life.
It is no exaggeration to claim that Chaplin – thirty years after his death – directly influenced me to stop dying my hair. The symbolism of letting go of one thing in order to embrace something new – in my case a transformation in the way I view myself and, maybe, the way the outside world views me – is undeniable. This essay is not meant as a suggestion that the choice to refrain from hair coloring is the most noble and correct one. That’s just silly. Thinking of aging since my father passed three years ago, I have concluded that the obvious things are the truest things – we all experience it from the day we are born, we are all constantly moving toward death. Superficially and perhaps humorously all of us who reach a certain age have gray, silver, white, or no hair, despite the mass availability of dyes and hair weaving products. Yet the joyful celebration that we are able to experience and share, the strength of taking up our daily responsibilities, and the courage that we show in the vast array of what we call the human condition lives on long after we are gone. The waves caused by the rock thrown in the pond just keep going and going. Aging well consists of knowing this more and more deeply every day.
Page last updated: 12/16/2008 14:01
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