Hair Sytles and Early Mornings

At lunch we got to talking about how much time people sleep and what time they do it after a guy was asked where his wife was. “Still sleeping,” he said. It was nearly one o`lock in the afternoon. “Is she sick?” someone asked. “Nope,” he replied. “She was still reading at 3:00 when I got up to use the bathroom. She does that. Reads all night and sleeps all morning.”  

One guy here likes to go to bed at 9:00 and get up at 4:30. I think he’s crazy to set an alarm that early but he likes the quiet of the mornings to read or drink coffee with his own thoughts. I get that in a married couple. 24/7 in retirement could get on anyone’s nerves no matter how much you love each other. This couple have been together since they both served in the Air Force during Vietnam. He’s also got the best deck in the complex to watch the world wake up over the lake in one direction and in the woods in the other direction. I do understand the attraction of early mornings; it's the kind of thing that inspires poets. But I'm too old to change my body clock...even though I know it's coming in my future when they'll drag me out of bed at 6:00 in an assisted living facility where everything runs on institution time. Got a taste of that when I was in Respite Care after breaking my ribs.

Another guy living here is a fixture at the lunch table but wife never comes with him. She likes to eat alone in the apartment or goes shopping while he socializes over our 2 to 2 1/2 hour lunches. A lovely couple but recently she came back from a morning at a spa and asked us all how we liked her new hairdo. It was shoulder length and was teased to stand out as wide as her shoulders. It looked like a rat’s nest on steroids and I had to slap my inner bitch from blurting out, “If I got a haircut like that I’d be looking for a new stylist.” Before the makeover she wore her hair in a messy bun at the nape of her neck. And before anyone else says it, I know that voluminous, full-to-the-shoulders look is in fashion right now but her hair is too thin for that and even with the teasing you could see right through it to her scalp. On her, it looked like she stuck her finger in a light socket which proves my theory that some hair styles need to stay in their own lane age and ethnicity-wise. 

Okay, I just opened up that can of worms, didn’t I. I remember having this same ethnic hair discussion back in 1979 when Bo Derek shocked Mr. and Mrs. Mainstream Public with her blonde cornrows while promoting her movie, 10. In a recent interview she said, “I get in trouble for it now. I get a lot of criticism for being a culture vulture, that I’m being insulting and even worse, hurtful to African American women that I copied their hairstyle. However back then, the reaction was totally different. I can’t tell you how many African American women came up to me and said things like, ‘Thank you so much. I work at a bank and my boss would never let me have that hairstyle at work but now I can.’”

The evening we sat around with neighbors discussing Bo Derek the room of four couples was split down the middle by sex. The women all hated her hair and the guys all loved it. It would be interesting to gather the same group of us together again to see if we still think ethnic hairstyles should or shouldn’t cross the color line. Now, we'd probably be talking about dreadlocks or sisterlocks instead of cornrows. We see a lot of sisterlocks here because all of our waitresses have them---waist long and tall enough to add another 6-7 inches to their height and full of twists and patterns with locks of color here and there. I really don’t like their hair because it’s the only thing you notice about the girls.

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They also have me wondering if the hair is real and if it itches or is hard to sleep on. Does all that hair make their necks hot and their shoulders sweat? Does the weight of their hair give them headaches? All questions I don't ask, of course. But if they were white I probably would get around to asking and I wouldn't think twice that I'd be stepping over a line. All I know for sure is it's supposed to be rude to feel an African American's hair texture. A little boy in an iconic photo with Obama did it but if that boy had been white the story drawn from the photo would have been entirely different.

Ohmygod, does this post make me sound racist? Hair is (or should be) just hair, a fashion choice as much as a practical choice. When I was in high school I was trying to wear smooth pageboys with my Italian, thick and naturally curly hair. I slept with my hair rolled around OJ cans. Didn’t we all at one age or another want a hairstyle that was totally wrong for our type of hair? Well, maybe all of us white women wanted that but having cornrows and Jheri Curls labeled as acceptable hairstyles for black women was wanting a hairstyle that was suited for their hair texture yet those Employee Handbooks forbid them for decades. White people setting a nearly impossible standard for women of color in the work place. Nothing racist about that, she types while rolling her eyes.

I need to remember to be more tolerate and less critical the next time I see the shoulder-wide bush of white hair around this campus and the over-the-top sisterlocks that look like they outweigh the tiny girls who wear them. It truly is just hair and subject to our personal whims. Mrs. Bushy White Head is having fun with her new hair style and our waitresses are doing the same.

Recently the Enrichment Director asked all of us to submit photos of ourselves when we were young. Fifty of us did it and those photos were pasted on poster board and we were asked to identify as many pictures as we could for a contest. One person as able to correctly ID seventeen of us and the person who was identified correctly the most often was none other than me. Apparently my smile hasn’t changed since I was a kid. But what I thought was more interesting is how many of us still had the same hairstyles. ©