The Old Grey Mare

I was washing my hands at the sink at work today and looked up to see a piece of white string in my hair. When I went to pull it out I was shocked to discover this "string" was firmly rooted to my head! My first official grey hair!

Now, I don't want to imply that the hair is premature - it's not (most of my friends my age and my wife all are grey to one extent or another). And I don't want to suggest I am unhappy about it - I am actually pretty stoked about going grey.

A quick aside. You might be wondering why I choose to spell it "grey". Two reasons. First, that was the way it was spelled in my box of Crayolas when I was little, so it is happy-making for me to spell it that way as an adult. Second, I am a careless typist and rely on spellcheck way too much. A dropped letter and the sentence "I am actually pretty stoked about going gray" turns a paragraph about hair into an extremely interesting but totally inaccurate non-sequitur that my friends and family would never let me hear the end of.

Anyway, I know what some of you are thinking: "(insert fake world-weary sigh here) Yep. Kids'll do that to ya. Hyuk hyuk hyuk".

I seriously doubt that.

My mother used to say that her greying was caused by me and my brother and sister. Every time we did something to make her mad, she would get a grey hair. Let's consider that claim. There are 100,000 hairs on a human head. Let's say it takes 15 years to go totally grey after the first interloper appears. That means that we, as a team, seriously upset her 18 times a day every day for a decade and a half!

Jeez, I didn't think we were that bad. I mean, we (and all kids I guess) would have been intentionally horrible devil children if we knew we wielded the power to magically grey our folks merely by misbehaving. The resulting chaos-filled world would be filled with children's mocking laughter and populated with parents that look like very angry Steve Martins. In addition, all the moms would constantly be in traction because of the "step on a crack" rule but that's another story.

Mom also used to say that if she pulled one out, then nine more grey hairs would show up in its place. Not really sure why that would be or how to interpret that. If she meant that 9 grey hairs would sprout up to replace the uprooted one then all balding people would have to do is pluck out gray hairs in order to have a full, thick mane, wouldn't they? Of course, they would have to dye it... And if they got too carried away their skull would get so crowded with follicles that they could look like a freaky Lego person or a Ken doll or something - a solid helmet of hair.

Maybe she meant that, when you pull one, nine existing hairs immediately turn grey (out of sympathy for their lost brethren, I suppose). If you have Olympic level stick-to-it-iveness and it takes you 10 seconds to find and remove a gray hair, you would be completely gray after only 4 excruciating 8-hour shifts. Plus you would be 11% bald. And probably in a psychiatric hospital.

No, the old wives tales don't seem to hold water. I think Father Time has more to do with it than Baby Ethan. Although he does need to... Hold on a sec... Ethan! Ethan! Sit! Sit down! No, put that down! No, I mean it, potpourri bad! Damn it, come here! Yes, I know that's a tomato, you told me 40 times just a few minutes ago. No, no cookies right now. Hey, did you poop? What do you mean, "no"? Where are you going now? Come back here!