MonkeyPants

Hair Apparent.

I guess I have kind of distinctive hair. Saturday morning, on the ferry to go to my uncle’s funeral, I was preparing to sit down with a couple of acquaintances I’d run into on the bus, when one of them gestured behind me. “Do you know those people?”

I turned around. My cousin Sandra was waving frantically at me from across the ferry. “I do!” I saw that she was with the American Cousins, and waved back.

“I totally recognized your hair!” Sandra exclaimed.

I put a hand to my head. “You did?”

“Yeah. I recognized that curl, there.” She touched the one that tends to corkscrew down the right side of my face. “And the way you flicked it, I KNEW it was you!”

I know I have pretty distinctive hair. Not everyone can have hair that seems to explode from her head, lucky for them. Furthermore, not many people have hair that can equally be described as blonde, red, or brown, depending on the light or the day. But to be recognized for my hair by a relative who hasn’t seen me in about eight months, from a distance of about eighty feet? That’s some hair I have here.

The rest of me isn’t so distinctive. On my mother’s side, the gene pool is kind of small, and I have features in common with most other blood relatives on my mother’s side.

I’m kind of proud of my distinctive hair.