It's A Laughing Matter: A Bucket Of Ash

What is it about hair? If we listen to the ads, it’s just one more body part we need to feel overly self-conscious about. From the picture-perfect Breck Girls of the 40s and 50s to the Miss “If I have just one life, let me live it as a blonde” Clairol girls, to the poker straight hair of the 60s and the Afro of the 70s, hair is one of the root causes of why women are so dissatisfied with themselves. 

I know, because I’ve made most of these companies rich. As a child I whined, because I wanted Toni Jr. perm and Spoolies, while as a teenager I ran to hair straighteners. Then there was the Farrah Fawcett look of my 20s, but we won’t go there.

Yet, as I approach early-late-middle age, I still find myself fiddling with my hair – this time it’s covering the more than occasional gray ones.

There are those who have no problem flaunting their pigment-challenged locks; Sadie and I are not among them. While we have so far eschewed all facial fillers and body sucking systems, we have drawn the line at gray hair.

I’ve gone with a lighter ash color, while Sadie, against my advice, has tried to keep her natural dark brown color even though it doesn’t match her skin tones anymore. But we still swear we hear the “sprong” sound these hairs make as the gray stealthily takes over. There are days when we feel the only solution is to just stick my head in a bucket of ash and be done with it.

It was over a glass of “whine” and some cheese that we came up with our chart as to how we got to this place. Simply put, we developed the S&M Onomatopoetic Sprong-O-Meter for determining which events have caused our locks to give up the ghost and go gray. Here is a sampling.

S&M Onomatopoetic Sprong-O-Meter

• Kids who use plastic bags as parachutes to jump from balconies

• Having to refill every TP holder in a house with four bathrooms in a single day.

• Boarding a plane and realizing you’ve left “the needs to be refrigerated” liquid antibiotic on the kitchen counter.

• Discovering a flooded basement is not covered by insurance.

• Discovering that once your basement has flooded, you are ineligible for flood insurance, but they will insure the top part of your house that wasn’t flooded.

• Receiving a call that a child is standing up through a sunroof of a car with a newly minted driver at the wheel.

• Receiving second call saying that the same child is mooning a carload of girls, but not through the sunroof.

• Being awakened at 3 a.m. by a child who says, “I can explain.”

• Having a sheriff’s deputy come to the door wanting an explanation.

• Said child being subpoenaed because of the explanation.

• Having a spouse discover during a family wedding that his child has a tattoo.

• Body piercing.

• Spouses who wait until the thunderstorm is right over the house to clean out the gutters.

• Spouses who wait to put up the holiday lights until it is almost dark with a blizzard fast approaching.

• Returning from a vacation with a sick child where there has been a plague outbreak.

• Doctors who say, “Those tonsils should have been removed five years ago.”

• Lawyers who say, “You can’t sue the city for causing the flood because of British Common Law.”

• Discovering that all those times you’ve “smelled something,” it was really the electrical wires frying, because a spouse used a 100-watt bulb in a 40-watt socket.

• Noticing that the new beige towels are now a peculiar dirt brown color.

• Realizing there’s been no soap in the kids’ bathroom for a week.

• Discovering the odd tasting “expensive” whiskey was filled with tea to compensate for the missing liquid.

• Receiving a call at 4:15 a.m. that your child did not disembark from an international flight and that the police and customs agents have listed him as “gone missing internationally.”

Actually, this last item goes beyond the Sprong-O-Meter’s range, because the call caused most of your hair to fall out and you will need the Hair Club for Men instead.

Of course there are those who have suggested that instead of sticking my head in a barrel of ash, that it might be more appropriate to stick it where the sun don’t shine.

I don’t know, I think the color would be too dark, don’t you?