Lavender Hair

Have you ever been brave enough to ask somebody just what it is that they like about you? Why they want to be your friend? Why they want to date you? Why they fell in love with you? Well, I have, but that’s not how I found out that I have lavender hair. Oh, by the way, I am one who falls in love all the time, even with the weather and the color of the sky, for I believe that love is the essence of our existence, so I use the term “fall in love” quite liberally, as you will see.

In grade school, a young boy fell in love with me because I had lavender hair, but he isn’t the one who told me about it. He told my sister, she was his babysitter. I am sure you know that my hair isn’t lavender, back then it was auburn, streaked with highlights from being out in the California sun. Apparently, if you are an eight-year old boy, lavender is the word that expresses the most beautiful color that hair could ever be on a girl, and that is how I became the girl with the lavender hair. Do you believe in coincidence? Lavender, both the color and the plant, remain my favorites to this day, even more than my beloved roses and camellias, and I have to believe it was because of all the love that a young boy poured into the word lavender to describe my hair.

About the same time, an older man fell in love with me, the tiny girl with the long lavender curls. He was a famous actor. I was attending a parade with my mom, my dad was on in a float in the parade, a down-home sort of affair, in lovely Torrance, California. This graceful dashing man sat down in the empty spot on the bench next to me, exclaimed to my mom what a darling little girl I was, and placed his arm around me. I may have been young, but my mom had already had “the talk” with me about strangers talking to you or touching you. So, God bless that poor well-intentioned man, I sort of … ah … growled at him and pulled away to cling to my mom. My mom, on the other hand, was just about ready to pass out, as her daughter had just wiggled away from the man who was the latest heartthrob on TV. She had never told me that there was a special corollary to that rule making an exception for handsome actors who would be allowed to put their arm around you if your mom is sitting right next to you.

Not all men fell in love with me because of my hair. In high school, a guy fell in love with me because of the freckles over my nose, he was a senior, I was a frosh. Another one because I could talk for hours. Several more, because I was always so cheerful, one even wrote a poem about it in my yearbook. Another, just because he liked to be wherever I was, maybe so he could stare at my lavender hair? I never knew he was in love with me, for I had a boyfriend, the “big man on campus”. This guy would take me to all my boyfriend’s football games. I never figured it out though, until we were at separate colleges and he tried to send me red roses for Valentine’s Day, but I received tulips. I was so happy when he called and I thanked him for the tulips. His surprise that they were tulips and not red roses was a moment I will never forget, but I was still dating the same man from high school, so that ‘no red roses’ moment was the way our love story ended. Coincidentally, to this very day, no man yet has ever managed to successfully send me a dozen red roses; apparently even the Universe wept over that one.

There were many men who fell in love with me because of my gentle nature, my peaceful aura. I remember one who would laugh at me and call me “the Puffer Fish.” He knew that there wasn’t a mean cell in my body. You know how sometimes, when you are feeling particularly frustrated or angry, how you will use the phrase “I could just kill them . . ?” He couldn’t help but burst out laughing when I said that phrase, for there was no way on God’s green earth that he could ever conceive of me ever causing harm to anyone or to anything. How wonderful for someone to think you are the ultimate in gentle behavior, even though you didn’t turn out to be the girl of his dreams, and we eventually went our separate ways.

Once a client of mine told me that he had feelings for me, and I was shocked. He had a gorgeous, absolutely darling wife, I considered her to be a good friend, one of my favorite people on the planet. I asked him what on earth it could possibly be? He said my voice. My goodness. My voice? I told him nothing would ever happen, that he was married, and I asked him if we could we still be clients and friends, and we kept it that way. He was also among the very big group of men who loved my perfume, it was how he knew I was in the office on any given day and he might have a chance to hear my voice.

Staying with that perfume thread, some men can fall in love with just about anything too. I was in an elevator once with a gentleman, just the two of us, we were both faced forward waiting for our floors, then I heard him ask in a breathy voice beside me … are you wearing Jessica McClintock perfume? He obviously had already fallen in love with that perfume and learned its name. I can’t tell you how many men through the years have asked me what perfume I wear, and they have actually written it down so they wouldn’t forget the name; but I can tell you this, I do believe that perfume is “a keeper”. If you are a lady still searching for a signature scent, you just might want to give it a try.

A man vacationing in Puerto Vallarta fell in love with me when he saw me walk upstairs for dinner. He and his friends had already eaten and they were just getting ready to leave. My friends and I were just being seated. He sent a single red rose up to my table. I wonder just how he described me to the hostess so she’d know who to give the rose to . . . perhaps . . the girl with the lavender hair? I thought it was sweet, but I was with my girlfriends. We just rolled our eyes, laughed and ordered our dinner, as we had already learned that you don’t change your plans just because some guy takes interest in you. When our dinner was over, almost two hours later, he was still waiting downstairs. He took us all dancing. We had a wonderful evening. He promised me that he’d write to me, he was a pilot in Alaska. Then he laughed and told me, who the heck did he think he was kidding, that he didn’t even write to his mother! I find this an exceptionally funny memory now, as I have moved to Alaska, and I’m the one who is the writer, but then that evening was thirty years ago, and there are far too many pilots up here to ever figure out who he was. He may be the reason that I love flying so much; and I think he may have fallen in love with me over that famous lavender hair.

One man fell in love with me because he thought I looked great in the morning, and also because I wouldn’t eat a moose. I was staying with friends and I was making a cup of tea on a Saturday morning. I was wearing a black tank top and yoga pants, my standard sleeping attire. He had popped by to meet his friend and commented that I looked “so well put together in the morning”, and I could see the dreamy look in his eyes. I laughed and told him that I had just gotten out of bed, I didn’t have any makeup on and I hadn’t even combed my hair yet. He still had that same look on his face, but this time it read, if this is as bad as she ever gets, I think I could get used to it, especially that hair, even uncombed. And the moose? He teased me about eating moose because I live in Alaska. I told him I didn’t eat moose, that they weren’t a meal, that they were my neighbors! He didn’t know what to say, but I’d bet my life that he will never ever eat a moose, and if he had eaten moose previous to meeting me, that he was sorry now that he ever ate it.

So many men have fallen in love with that lavender hair. The hairdresser who met me at a bar and begged me to meet him the next day so he could braid it. The boyfriend whose mom had been a model, who loved me to wash my hair just before we went out to dinner; my drip-dry lavender hair would dry itself while we ate a lovely meal at a swanky restaurant and drank fine wine. There were the men who made me promise to not cut it, no matter how old I got. They were amazed at its softness. I don’t use a hair dryer, and it is long hair. I don’t dye it, even though it is graying now, and they even seem to love that. Sometime last year, I was getting out of a car and a man commented to his friend about how beautiful my hair looked; it is still long, and it is streaked with the grey highlights that come with being in your fifties. His friend replied back that it was graying, and he said, yeah, but isn’t it beautiful? A sentiment so sweet that the story was later passed on to me by his friend.

You may never know exactly what it is about you that makes others think that you are beautiful, and it might surprise you. They may tell you where your beauty lies, if you are ever brave enough to ask, and there is a lesson there for all of us. Always seek to be yourself, and to stay in your own beauty, at any age. As life moves you along and you are aging, remember to do so gracefully, to keep smiling, and that even gray hair can be beautiful . . . especially if it used to be lavender when you were young.