Does anyone remember the very old song which contained these lines, “The old gray mare, she ain’t what she used to be?” Those lines, or at least the sentiments from those lines, have had millions of women rushing for the bottle of hair dye the moment the first gray hair made its debut. (As a side note, I would observe that there is no comparable song for the old gray stallion, but that is for another day.)
What is it about the color gray? We don’t look forward to a gray day, and grey skies denote problems in our lives. Having a gray personality means that you are boring, and gray areas in ideas or rules are to be avoided. One look at the thesaurus is enough to turn ones hair that color instantly: ‘dreary, melancholy, drab, uninspiring, bleak, depressing,’ and that is only a partial list.
No wonder I too ran for the beauty parlor when I began to turn gray. For years I battled the gray roots and spent hours in a chair hiding what was really growing on top of my head. And then came the corona virus and an out-of-state move. At first unable to go to a salon, followed by having difficulty in finding a new beautician when the shops opened once again, my gray roots turned into a gray head of hair. Now five months later, here I am, completely gray and feeling, if I am honest, relieved.
If we of a certain age have discovered one sure thing after all these years, it is that life is not black and white, but a nuanced gray, a color that is actually a mixture of black and white in equal proportions. There is a poetic way of looking at this which was expressed by the German author Jean Paul in the 1800s: “Gray hairs seem to my fancy like the soft light of the moon, silvering over the evening of life.” But I much prefer the warning from Charles Lamb, “We grow gray in our spirit long before we grow gray in our hair.” May our gray hair, an expected manifestation of our age, have no relation to our continuing contributions to the world.