I will not go gray gracefully...

Within my lustrous auburn locks I found, a gray hair, single, and utterly root bound.
That is terribly scary. Imagine you wake up one morning, yawn and stretch. Put on your sock monkey slippers and shuffle into the kitchen where you fill your tea pot and turn on the stove. You wander sleepily into the bathroom to wash your face. Might as well run a brush through that head of matted mange bed hair. "Wait...what is that? It cannot be," The light reflects off a single hair as you look in the mirror above the bathroom sink. Sleep sand stuck to your eyes, pale, and puffy, you suddenly flush red with shock.

It's a gray hair.

I am in the prime of my twenties. I come from a family with a heritage of rich, thick, black hair. My grandfather looks like a young, mediterranean, Marlo Brando, even at 80 plus years old. And here I am, with otherwise, thick, shiny, and dark brown/reddish hair, with a single gray traitor glaring at me in all it's glory. Newly grown, it seems to stand almost straight at the top near my forehead.

I scream and then pluck the d&*% thing out and run to my mother who is sitting in the kitchen. "Look!!" I shriek at her, "Look at this...this THING!"

My mother begins to laugh. A menical, sadistic laugh. And then she says, "Wow, I was YEARS older than you before I ever got a gray hair!"

I am on the lookout. Let's hope it was a fluke, an isolated case. I'm putting a box of hair dye in the back of my linen closet.

Speaking of hair, do you think if could be the hair oil I picked up at the Indian grocery store? I soak my head with it once a week and wrap it in a bandanna before bed. In the morning, I wash it as usual, and then have massive shine and softness for the rest of the week. The brand is called, "Ancient", it smells like almonds, and I've convinced myself that it is made in a secret apothecary deep in India, a family secret passed on from long-ago Mongol Empress Noor Jahan herself. This is much more fun than acknowledging that it has been made only since 1978 at some factory in Mumbai.

It is all natural, but now that I think of it, there is very little English on the box. Maybe it contains bleach and I really didn't have a gray hair.