SHADES OF GRAY – AND PINK --- By Lee B. Weaver

There was a time in my life when waking up to find my hair was pink would have been unthinkable.

(Of course, there was a time before that when waking up to find my hair was pink, or plaid, or gone was not only thinkable, it was right there on the short list of possible outcomes from any given night before.)

(I guess what I’m talking about here is a certain time between that long-ago era of random youthful recklessness and my current era of sober thoughtful maturity.)

(Oh, the hell with it. I’m getting nowhere with this angle. Let’s try it again from the top.)

I woke up the other day and my hair was pink.

Not all of it. Just the portion above my right ear, which for the last several years has been various shades of gray.

Oh, and my right ear. It was pink, too.

To be sure, I didn’t have one of those bathroom-sink moments where I’m brushing my teeth and washing my face and suddenly look up in horror at my disfigured reflection.

Rather, two nice ladies in a downtown shop told me about it some three hours after I left the house.

At this point, rather than dwell on how I completed the whole face-washing/teeth-brushing process without noticing that a large chunk of my hair had turned a ghastly shade of old-lady-bad-dye-job red, I think our time is better spent wondering just how my altered state escaped the attention of everyone else in my family.

Not that I blame them.

At least not all of them.

We’ll get back to that.

After several stunned minutes in the downtown shop’s bathroom, alternately washing, rinsing and staring, slack-jawed, at my hair, I rejoined the ladies out on the showroom floor and started the investigation into how this had happened.

It took about three seconds, which, by the way, is the same length of time it takes for a nice lady in a downtown shop to ask the rhetorical question:

You have young kids, don’t you?

I raced home, my pink tresses glinting and flashing in the late-morning sun, where I conducted a brief examination of the house. The investigation began and ended in my bedroom, where I found a magenta ink stain the size of a bread plate on my pillowcase.

Evidently, one of my kids had discovered the quasi-scientific pleasure of watching the contents from a magic marker absorbed by paper or fabric or, in this case, 450-thread count Egyptian cotton.

Admittedly, this is a pretty cool phenomenon to behold, but I couldn’t help but wonder what, exactly, was or wasn’t going on in the mind of the child that would allow for such a complete transfer of ink from marker to pillowcase. At some point, say, when the ink was actually pooling and puddling on the surface of the material before being absorbed into the fabric and the pillow inside, wouldn’t a normal, sane person be shaken from his reverie, if only for a second, and..and –  BAM!

It had to be Jack.

Only the boy child possessed the necessary combination of curiosity and cluelessness to so utterly ruin something of obvious value.

The boy, of course, denied it. This despite the fact that his sisters had all been away at relatives’ houses for days, making him, technically, the only potential suspect.

Returning to my original point, there was a time when the sudden onset of pink hair simply wasn’t possible. And if it did happen, I could take comfort in knowing that I had done it to myself.

But having kids means being eternally, insanely, cruelly at a loss for suitable explanations. It’s a world where stains mysteriously appear and money magically disappears.

Where logic evaporates and madness seeps in.

Where even the shades of gray become shades of pink.