Once my hair turned more gray than black, say in the last few years or so, I began to detect a discernible difference in how I was being perceived. There was a slight deference in basic one-on-one interactions with strangers, a little more respect and used of ‘sir’ from servers and waitstaff, and the slimmest shift in meetings with people who had previously dismissed or discounted me. It wasn’t anything huge or dramatic, just a gentle, sloping tilt in what I felt from other people. It’s possible this is all in my head – that’s always possible – but I’m usually pretty perceptive when it comes to reading a room and its reactions, and it felt like my gray hair was giving me some sort of ancient authority that wasn’t there when I speared much younger.
At the same time, it also relegated me to near invisibility in certain social scenes where youth and beauty still reigned supreme. A strange sort of trade-off, another confounding paradox. Respect and invisibility, deference and dismissal – and somewhere in the middle of it all a head of wavy wolf’s hair trying valiantly, desperately, to embrace the autumn of life.
