Waiter, there's a gray hair in my family, and I think it's us
By Burton W. Cole
It started a few Cole family picnics ago, one of those cozy, lakeside picnics involving about 120 relatives and enough food to feed all of Rhode Island plus a couple counties in Vermont.
Between bites of green bean casserole and cheesy scalloped potatoes, I surveyed assorted cousins around the grazing tables. I noticed something.
"Honey," I said to my wife, "Why are all the kids my age going gray?"
She just rolled her eyes and kept eating deviled eggs.
Since she didn't know, I asked one of my cousins.
"Not all of us are getting gray hair," she said, primping her own locks, which she insists weren't influenced by a bottle. "Look at Ron. His hair just falls out."
Well yeah, there's that.
I don't get it. Wasn't it just a year or two previous that we were the teenagers pushing those puffy, lazy adults across the grass to get a supersized softball game going? Now we settle for waddling wind sprints to the dessert table.
At the other end of the pavilion, another family feasted. "Hi, Jim!" I called to a guy I knew.
It wasn't Jim. It was his brother Bruce, who was in my high school graduating class. Or maybe it was Brian. I never could keep the twins straight. But never before had I confused them with big brother Jim, who used to be much, much older than us.
Earlier this year, my graduating class held its reunion. I studied the photos looking for old buddies. Instead, a bunch of old geezers stood in the way.
“Why are the wrinklies hiding our classmates?” I wanted to know.
“The wrinklies ARE our classmates,” came the answer. “'78 was great 45 years ago. Now we're great-grandparents.”
“But... but... These people are OLD!”
“Haven't peeked a mirror lately, have you, Santa Claus? The beard and hair are pretty snowy white.”
Was it really that long ago that we were romping through junior high, making fun of our parents with “'50s Days?" The girls wore poodle skirts and too much red lipstick, and we guys greased back our (not gray at all) hair into ducktails and wore leather jackets over white T-shirts and jeans.
My mom insisted that any hoodlums who would actually dare show up at school that way in her day would have been sent home to change into something that fit the dress code. I think she made it up. We watched the documentary “Grease.” We know how the cool kids dressed.
Twenty years later, my children had '70s days, a pointless event in which kids laughed themselves silly over kinky (but not gray) hair, bell bottoms and disco music. I tried to tell them we didn't look half that goofy in the 1970s. They thought I was just making it up. They'd watched enough nostalgic TV shows to know better.
Worse, that fad faded decades ago. Now they mock the silly styles of the 2010s. Which means I am now older than nostalgia itself.
I remember trying to tell my kids that the junk they called music that was curling the paint around the rattling windows sounded like two dying moose trashing a saw mill. And all those so-called bands had stupid names.
I tried. But it was my dad's voice I heard, the one that never made sense. Well, not back then. Now my daughter is trying not to sound like her dad to her teenage boy.
And that's why the kids my age have gone gray. Those of us who still have hair, anyway.
Turn down the radio and send Clairol to the old gray goose at burton.w.cole @ gmail. com or the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.