What does your sign say?

My brothers by blood and spirit

My oldest friend and travelling partner and I can’t get together without discussing our younger years.  We discussed and dissected those years a lot during out recent visit.  She and I both attended a private, Catholic elementary school through the eighth grade and we lived relatively sheltered lives.  Having older sisters and brothers we were wise to the important things like the Beatles, The Who, Led Zeppelin, and The Monkees.   But we were severely naïve when it came to the Ways of the World.  When we entered the ninth grade we were thrown headfirst into the Ways of the World, but our naivete, i.e. insecurities, hovered over our heads like a big, blinking, sign reading, “Keep Away”. 

For me the “Keep Away” sign kept blinking until I met the man who was to become my husband right at the end of my senior year in high school.  But that is another story for another day.  When I started college the sign kept blinking, but the message changed to, “Look-A-Here!”  Well, maybe it was the audience that changed.  I was no longer an insignificant fish in a puddle.  I was a not-so-bad-looking fish in a small lake.  I was being noticed by (gasp) boys for the first time in my life.  My phone was ringing.

If I could go back and relive a day in time it would have to be a day in 1986.  I was 20. I was thin.  I was tan.  I had good hair.  I had dates.  That was the year I made Bold and Brave Decisions, one of which was to take my first trip abroad without a family member.  Another was to, well, that is another story for another day.

That was a long time ago.  I am no longer 20, or thin, or tan.  My husband and I go on dates to the grocery store and doctor appointments.  I no longer have good hair.  The blinking sign says, “Look Away”.

Hence, my point.  There comes a time in every woman’s life when she must look Vanity in the eyes and blow a raspberry in her face.  I will never again be 20, just a multiple thereof, and I will never have the body I had when I was 20.  I could still get a tan if I really wanted one, but my hair is dismal.   I  really want to have good hair again.

That is why on August 2, 2012 at 12:00 noon I will enter Belk department store, go the second floor and sit in my stylist’s chair.  I will make a Brave and Bold Decision and tell her to color my hair in a way that will ease me gracefully into gray, because that is what lurks beneath.  I’m hoping it will one day look like my sister’s, the pesky one.  When she stopped coloring her hair it became brilliant again.

So, I am ready to embrace my inner gray and start a new chapter.  And then the blinking sign will say, “She’s On Her Way”.