Scarlet and Gray

"Has this been bothering you for a long time?" Nghi asked.

"Yeah, why?" I said.

"Your head. You're gray." She said, with great concern.

We were talking about my future when my furrowed brow must have caused her eyes to catch a glimpse of my aging scalp.

I found my first gray hair when I was 22. I remember straightening my hair in my tiny bathroom on Fairmount St. when something glimmered in the mirror. I took a closer look, grabbed my tweezers, pulled, and taped it to a black piece of paper.

Proudly, I showed it to a friend in class that afternoon. "Check it out. I'm going gray. I blame Dr. Anderson."

We giggled at my new-found adult-ness and I remember thinking how cool it would feel to be a 20-something year old with gray hair.

This is a picture of my father holding me. I am one week old. My father is 32. You can see his gray hair starting to show around his temple and in his mustache.

Growing up, my friends always thought that my father was my grandpa. His hair turned white soon after I was born. He used to jokingly blame my brother and I for making him turn white, but in looking at family photographs, his entire family had white hair at remarkably young ages.

After my father passed away, I remember wanting someone to look at me and say "Oh, you have your father's ______!" I wanted a physical trait that undeniably connected me to him. I used to stare at pictures of my father and look at myself in the mirror hoping to see some sort of resemblance. However, I look exactly like my mother (which isn't a bad thing... my mother is quite beautiful).

This is a picture of my head taken about 20 minutes ago. Before moving here, I dyed my hair back to it's original color to prevent having to use Chinese hair dyes again and it has only illuminated my quickly graying head. I'm not really ashamed at the grays (even though I counted over 20 in 1 square inch). I'm weirdly proud of them. I feel like I finally have a physical trait that links me to my father... and I feel distinguished.