New Year: The Letter

I recently discovered my first gray hairs. It was truly a sincere sensation. I was minding my own business, brushing my teeth in the bathroom, and suddenly, checking my face in the mirror, there they were. On the temples, on both sides, like sideburns from hell. I looked like Clark Cable. Oh my GOD, I thought, spat out the toothpaste and almost hit my nose on the surface, getting a closer look. Undeniable grays. What?

The shattering, harsh reality of aging had finally caught up with me. The fact that I wear my hair short only underlined the horrendous sight in the mirror; I couldn’t even hide the strays underneath my flaming locks of auburn hair, like Jolene.

What the hell was going on? Grays? Already? I hadn’t even done anything yet! I had lived my life the way many people born in the late Seventies had: biding my time, daydreaming the years away like the in-betweeners we were, always telling people that one day, when I grew up, I would be a writer. One day. And I had no one else to blame but myself. Everyone thinks they are immortal, I believe Regina Spektor said it best: You’re young until you’re not. The thought of my own demise had been incomprehensible to me before. But now, there it was, undeniable evidence that Dorian Gray I wasn’t.

I glanced at the tweezers on the side table, then, superstitiously, quickly looked away, remembering a line from I think it was Steel Magnolias, how, if you yank one out, three more will come to its funeral. Reluctantly I took Olympia Dukakis’ word for it. When had I become old enough to start quoting Steel Magnolias? Why couldn’t I just say Beetlejuice three times fast and have Michael Keaton appear and badger the grays off?

I called an emergency meeting with J. and took a bus to a neighboring town to see her. She tried to make me feel better, claiming that she, too, had some grays, but I didn’t see anything, and neither did she, trying to pin them down when we were comparing grays at her store. “You just better find them”, I warned her, “Otherwise, I’m gonna have to start taking hostages.” Like the wily minx she is, she distracted me with some new sweaters and cardigans just in from Italy, and only later did I realize we never really got back to her alleged grays. Maybe that was for the best.

My colleagues at work had three different sorts of responses: people who were ten years or more my junior were inexplicably thrilled. “Man, you’re so lucky!” Women my age were more sympathetic, and I think I saw them sneak into the john to check their own situation as soon as the conversation came to a halt. The men in my age group were all about damage control. One of my closest friends at work, H., told me that at least I didn’t have the balding issue men did, which was sweet. He was the one who had comforted me in the deepest throes of my insomnia, when I believed I was slowly losing my mind, by saying that all geniuses were crazy, weren’t they? I don’t believe anyone else has ever made me feel as good about my deteriorating mental state.

Every time I looked in the mirror, my eyes went straight to the temples. Were they still there? Were they still gray? Were there more? I thought I saw my grays creeping upwards, reaching the front of my head, so that if I ever cut bangs I would have a silver streak on my forehead as if I was Harry Potter’s grandmother. Would I go berserk and start dyeing my hair now, after going with my natural brown for almost twenty years? No, I wouldn’t go back to the bottle. That would be a never ending vicious circle, no matter how much hair dye had improved during these years.

Suddenly, I remembered a day maybe five years ago. It was my day off and I was doing some idle shopping in town, book browsing with a friend. We were at the best used books shop in town, on the basement floor, lost in our respective aisles and titles and thoughts. I have no recollection whatsoever which section I was currently browsing, but I remember the moment the letter fell into my hands from between the pages of the book. It wasn’t an old letter in the sense of “old letter from the front”, or “old letter from before The War”; it was a somewhat new letter, from the Eighties or early Nineties, there was a date, but I have forgotten this detail. There was no envelope, only the letter itself, written by a woman to a man.

Here’s what it said, from memory only:

“Hello. I know we promised never to write, but I was visiting my aunt a few months ago, and walking those streets made me think of you and old times. My aunt asked if I still kept in touch with you, and was very surprised to learn that I didn’t know that you had had two children, both girls. She told me she had seen you, some years ago, waiting in a line at the department store, with your daughters and a woman she believed to be their mother.

“I hope you are well, and years have been kind to you. Do you still ever go to the swing by the birches? Do you take your daughters there? My life is the same as always. I was married, too, for a while. Maybe you knew. Maybe not. I still see X. and Y. from time to time, you know they moved back East? Are you happy? Do you still think it was the right choice? Of course we were all so young back then.

“I just wanted to say hello, and that I remember. Sincerely, A.”

When I had read the letter, I nearly fell down on the book piles. It was amazing, really incredible. It was like something from a movie. And to think that someone had sold the book, unchecked, to the book shop, and they had put it on the shelf, and I had taken that particular book in hand. I felt like crying. I showed it to my friend, and we both felt that I would have to now buy the book which had contained the heartfelt declaration from all those years ago. I guess technically I could have just asked the kind proprietor about the letter, but we felt it belonged to the book: maybe it had been hidden there, and had stayed hidden for a long time.

So, I ended up buying the book to get a hold of the letter. Since there was neither a return address nor even the receiver’s name, and everyone else were mentioned by their first names only, it was impossible to figure out where it could have come from, and whom it belonged to, so now I had it, indefinitely.

My friend and I glided to get some coffee, because it was winter then, too, and discussed the letter at length. The tone of the writing was so poignant, so surrendered, that it was hard not to think of ways to be of help, somehow. Then again, judging by the fact that the book had been taken to a second-hand store, probably unopened, hinted that the owner had either died, or hadn’t remembered the existence of the thing and therefore hadn’t cared anymore, so why should we bother with it? The book itself was of no further help. To this day I can’t remember even what it was about. There was no dedication, no Ad Libris, nothing. We stared at the artifacts, stumped, like drunken Holmes and Watson staring at a petri dish.

I went home, thought about the letter for some weeks, how horrible, and how heart wrenching, it was that she had always been carrying a torch for this nameless man, and obviously regretted whatever had broken their union. Then, as things go in life, I forgot about it.

I have since lost the letter, which is very unlike me. I am, by nature, extremely unbohemian; very organized and tidy, and I couldn’t believe I was no longer able to bring to mind the name of the book that I bought just to get the letter, because they went together. Last time I moved I tried to look for it. I have, though, taken books to that antiquarian book shop myself a couple of times since purchasing the letter containing title. Maybe it wanted to disappear. Maybe I wasn’t meant to keep it. This way, at least, there is another chance for the letter to fall out to someone’s hands when they open the book.

As for my gray stray hairs: I have, now, embraced my grays, and while it may not be a totally harmonious union yet, I have, paraphrasing The Lorelai Gilmore, joined a support group, bought a hair brush, and now just taking it one day at a time. (So, you want to know, what was the big thing, the Midlife Crisis thing, I did after my rude awakening to the passing of time, and the fact that, I, too, would bite the dust one day? Well, I started this blog. No more waiting. And let me tell you, it was no mean feat for a neophyte.)

Here’s to us all: Happy New Year! Whatever resolution we make, let’s keep it. Just think about the letter. And my grays.

For Kyle Menard, who also got busy with it.