"You have hair like an old lady," my four-year-old granddaughter said to me one day last month. It was a simple observation, not a judgment. No negativity implied. Charlotte and I were at my kitchen table sitting side-by-side making a birthday card for her mother, when she looked at me and made this totally innocent, out-of-the-mouths-of-babes statement.
I, of course, took it personally.
"I have hair like an old lady?" I repeated, thinking, I do? I can't. That's not possible. How can this be? I spend a fortune trying not to have old lady hair. I wanted her to say, "Just kidding!" the way she does when she says things like, "There's a fly on your pancakes, Mimi. Just kidding!" or, "There are lions in your back yard. Just kidding!" I wanted her to take the words back.
But instead she confirmed them. She looked at me and nodded and said for the second time, "Yes, Mimi. You have hair like an old lady." And then, "May I have the green marker, please? And the yellow one, too?"
I hadn't used the hair dryer that day. I had, in the parlance of my hairdresser, Donna, "embraced my curls." Donna is always saying I should go with the flow and not fight nature and get some "good," a.k.a. expensive, products and enjoy what comes naturally.
That morning I decided to listen to her.
"It's the curls, right?" I asked Charlotte. "That's why I have hair like an old lady? It looks better straight, doesn't it?"
By then (no surprise), Charlotte was done with the hair conversation. She was up to her elbows in glitter and glue and talking about her friend Alana from school. "You have a LLAMA at school?" I always say when she mentions Alana. And she always says, "No, Mimi. Alana, A-l-a-n-a," and we go back and forth like this until one of us gives up, which takes a long, long time. But I gave up early this day. I was fixated on my hair.
After we finished the birthday card, I got Charlotte two Girl Scout cookies (she asked for four), a glass of milk, and a Dora book, set her up in the family room, then hightailed it upstairs, got out my hair dryer, and blew out the curls.
"Now what do you think?" I asked her, reappearing with a whole new do.
"It still looks like old-lady hair, Mimi," she said, glancing up from her book.
I sat down beside her, sighed, and said, more to myself than to Charlotte, "Well, I guess I have hair like an old lady because I am an old lady."
And Charlotte, without missing a beat, turned to me, grinned, and said in her lilting voice, "You are not an old lady. You're Mimi!"
And the world was back on its axis. And I laughed, too.
A few days later, Charlotte and her cousins Lucy and Megan were all visiting and they asked for water and ice cream, and then Cheez-Its. We ended up counting our age out in Cheez-Its.
Charlotte got four-and-a-half and Megan got four-and-a-half and Lucy got eight-and-a-half, but I got practically the whole box.
Or so it seemed.
I counted, "One, two, three, four..." and made rows and rows of 10, and they stared wide-eyed and counted with me.
We counted all the way to 64.
And then we ate the Cheez-Its. I, of course, shared mine with the girls.
And Charlotte, who loves cookies in all shapes and forms, looked down at her fully loaded plate and declared, "It's a good thing you're 64, Mimi, because look at all we get to eat!"
And then she added, "I can't wait for you to be 100!"
And she wasn't kidding at all.
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