Color me crazy (or maybe: Color? Me crazy!--it works both ways)

Do you have technical difficulties with the boxes on official identification forms that ask for hair color? That one always baffled me. In my defense, I am a reasonably intelligent individual, but some things are beyond human ken--like just what kind of answer they want. Do they want the color I was born with, the color it is now, or the color of the last treatment I applied? Do they want documentary proof? Do I have to prove the veracity of my color? Would doing so hurt? It'd be much simpler if they asked for the relative density of a nitrogen cloud at absolute zero. (That question has almost as much application to my driving ability as hair color does.) That I could at least look up and give a definite answer to--and seem smart and scientific as a bonus. The hair color thing, though--that's a stumper.

For years it was easy: blond--very, very blond. After the overly-extended bald period of my life (which my mom swears lasted until I was two--but I've seen photos, and it couldn't have lasted past 20 months--22, tops) I developed the finest, whitest, thinnest cap of hair seen on this planet. The family term for this follicular affliction was "halo hair"--I guess they thought "lint on a lollipop hair" would have been detrimental to my infant self-esteem. Fortunately, I grew out of that stage just before kindergarten. (Which was a blessing, because by then they had fastened thick glasses on my face, and I couldn't have handled the combined mortification of being the weird fuzzy girl and the funny-looking kid with glasses. Although, now that I think about it, it might have cut down on the taunts while the other kids blew their cranial circuits deciding which rhyme to tease me with.) For the next six or so years I went through the very blond, very straight, very cow-licked stage of hair-development. There are very few pictures from that part of my life.

About the time I hit junior high--glory be!!!--my hair started to darken up and exhibited a certain stringy quality. As if puberty, adolescence, and an absolute lack of social skill weren't enough to keep me from a total confidence breakdown.

I should explain here that I did my time in junior high during the 80s--the early part of that decade. Nobody had good hair, but most of them didn't realize it. There were the 70s holdovers, with their over-lacquered Farah Fawcett feathers. There were the protopunks. There were the chicks with the "large and in charge" hair--the responsible parties for at least 10% of the ozone-depletion scare. Me? I fell into a small subset of the embryonic very-early grunge movement (we had no idea that we were on the cutting edge of hip--back then it was just attributed to poor hygiene, and sadly, most of us outgrew it before we could use it to our advantage): limp and lifeless. Style we of that dark era may have lacked, but color was far more important. Blond was best--flirty, sassy, cheerleader-quality. Dark was desirable--intelligent-looking, witty, exotic. Vaguely indefinable blondish-but-sort-of-green-under-institutional-fluorescents color was nowhere on the scale of junior high acceptability.

By high school, I had developed hair schizophrenia: short and (accidentally--no joke!) dyed red one semester, long and almost natural the next. ( I had a brief fling with that stuff that was supposed to lighten your hair while you were in the sun--probably not the best color-altering option for someone who burns under 60-watt bulbs.) I spent a month teaching myself to French-braid my own hair just to get it mostly hidden. My hair was no longer blond in the classical sense--that sense being "like the color of well-ripened wheat" or even "vaguely honey-hued." I called it blond, but like most of my high school experience it was all a bluff. I knew my hair was less honey-colored and more the shade of botulism-infused pork and beans. But admitting that would have required infinitely more self-esteem than I had. (And can you blame me? Who states something like that in high school? My goodness, we were all seething masses of insecurity and sensitivity at that point. No one was going to admit to anything other than indifference!)

In college I discovered that even good girls can hit the bottle [of hair coloring]. I tried every shade of red--from deep auburn to slightly strawberry. No one knew how to describe me because they never knew what I would look like on any given day. If I had done the job the previous night I might look like an over-ripe eggplant. And if I was currently cash-free, I might look like a long-haired chihuahua with mange. (Perhaps my professors took pity on me and inflated my grades, figuring that anybody with hair color that bad needed something to keep them from despair. I'm okay with that.)

My color epiphany came on my mission. (One of those blessing of missionary work rarely admitted when speaking in church.) I served five months on the Navajo Reservation, in a trailer which was located in the center of the rodent cosmos. One day I noticed a strange funk wafting from the couch--the very cushion, in fact!--where I typically sat to study. My former mission companion tells the story better, but the upshot of it was that the funk was emanating from a squashed mouse. That's not the worst part, so stop gagging. The worst part was the realization that my hair and the fur of the flattened, slightly oozing mouse were the same color! That, my friend, is not a realization to build confidence on.

There is no box on the driver's license form for "rodent colored" hair. No one goes on TV and admits they take a small rodent for their colorist to match. There are no boxes of L'Oreal labeled "Rongeur Brun." (Go ahead, use Google Translate--I'll still be here when you're done.) But there it is: my hair was the color of furry disease-carrying pests. (Some would argue that I am a furry, disease-carrying pest, but they would be exaggerating.) I lived with this knowledge long enough to learn to laugh at it--sort of a follicle-related coping mechanism--but the laughs were a pale imitation of true mirth.

Still, you know, life has a way of evening things out eventually. I may have lived 37 years with really bad hair, but my time is coming. My son--the one with the majority of the future inheritance--showed me with a picture he had colored in Primary the other day. "That's Dad," he explained, "that's me, that's Lindy, and that's you, Mom." He had given me red hair--"Because that's what you have, Mom." Ha! I knew he was a genius. And from now on, if anyone asks what color my hair is, I know. My hair is red; my son said so. It's easier than explaining the mouse thing again.