The gray dilemma

It was the single least-stressful day in my recent memory: fishing, swimming, lazing about and reading on a lake in northern Maine, followed by a delicious nap until dinner. I’d indulged in a pleasant lack of hygiene, having not showered in some time.

This didn’t matter until I plopped myself down at the table, underestimating how my hair must have looked. It looked messy. By “messy” I mean something akin to a bloated tick or a scraggly mullet crowned by a giant leech. As eminently satisfied as I was, however, I could sit back and let my family ridicule me all they wished.
And that they did.

“Good God,” Dad crooned, “look at Erich!” Shoving a bony index finger in my face, he counted at least three unfortunate hairs across my pate. “White ... White ... White! Hah!”

“No,” I cried, “they’re just really, really, really light brown.”

Dad snorted. “They look white to me.”

Dinner wasn’t over, but my pristine day was. I’d gone 20 years, eight months and a few days without facing this unequivocal fact of life: I’m gonna be old-and-farty, and soon, for the hairs do not lie.

Which begs the question: Why do I have them? I’m not long enough in the tooth to have a beer, for Pete’s sake. But if you’d listened to my family, you’d be led to believe that hair-graying has nothing to do with age, which it damn well does. They bombarded me with conventional wisdoms, such as: “Some of it’s genetic,” or, “You can’t escape it, so just live with it.” These might be true to some degree.

My eldest brother, for instance, has an unsightly receding hairline, borrowed from my grandfather. By his late teens, he was fretting over not only graying, but missing hairs, too. That was eight or nine years ago; it’s decidedly worse now. My maternal grandmother was said to be completely gray by 40, and Steve Martin’s hair has been white for almost that long. Last Wednesday, Barack Obama acknowledged how much “more salt than pepper” he’s noticed up top since his campaign started. Graying hair (as opposed to hair that is simply gray, white or some other soulless color) finds no shortage of examples in our promising 21st century.

No matter how culturally infixed these ideas become, however, they fall frustratingly short of the truth. My hair is nothing like my brother’s. It doesn’t look, grow, feel or behave the same at all. And to insist on the propagation of fleeting genetic linkages is worse than stupid: It’s ignorant. I’m sure my mom’s mom never would’ve settled for a “scientific” explanation like “There’s my old Aunt Mildred catching up with me.”

The most tenable alternative explanation (and most belabored) is found in that sinister, sibilant word we’ve all come to know and despise: s-t-r-e-s-s. Some say you can control it; others say it’s either nature or nurture. I’m not too sure about either, but I do know I’ll be old soon – and won’t blame it on any one thing or person.