White Hair

I swear there are some times when I think I can actually feel my hair turning white.  It's a subtle sensation, hard to describe, just around the temples and ears.  It could be stress related, but it's different than my usual reaction to stress, which likes to manifest itself in the pit of my stomach.  I prefer to believe instead that I'm just feeling myself growing older.  Like the leaves on the trees this time of year, my hair is just changing color.  Sadly, just like those trees, I have fewer "leaves" than I used to.

I can remember the first white hair I found on my head.  There it was, front and center, a single white kinky strand intermixed with its straight brown neighbors.  The hair surprised me for a couple of reasons.  First, its length suggested that it had been residing on my head for awhile.  I wondered how it had gone unnoticed for so long.  Second, the kinkiness was something new for me.  My hair has always been very straight (so straight that a Vietnamese stylist once remarked, "You have hair like an Asian man, thick and straight.").  As I looked at this white kinky hair I wondered if perhaps, with time, I would end up with hair resembling Albert Einstein's.  That would've been kind of cool.  Alas, only the first few white hairs were kinky, almost like my body was experimenting with my look (let's try a new color, maybe some curl).  Soon enough everything went back to straight.

At first, the white hairs showed up infrequently enough that I could track each of them.  As the frequency increased, I was reminded of standing outside on a winter day watching the first, isolated snowflakes fall before a big storm.  At some point, there are enough flakes falling that you say to yourself, "It's snowing." At this point, you stop looking at the individual snowflakes and instead consider their cumulative effect.  It didn't take long for me to reach this point with my hair.