Lasting Impressions....

“A smoldering sexuality that spoke to me almost immediately.  When he first spoke, his masculine baritone moved my soul.  His eyes sparkled with intelligence, his smile was like a secret shared just between the two of us, and his shoulders were broad and strong.  I was smitten, and have never failed to feel my pulse race and my heart pound in his presence, even 40 years later.  This was the man I wanted to father my children!!!”

Had I known all this passion and purple prose boiled just under the surface of the guy with the 1970s hair and black rimmed glasses I had just met in Hatch Hall that summer of 1975, Blake's career path might have been so different!

And we, these forty years later, would no doubt be lounging on a sunny deck somewhere with a water view thanks to his long and wildly successful career as an author of one-a-year bodice rippers….under a nom de plume, of course.  

But, no, instead, what I saw was a fairly serious guy deeply involved in a book...a guy who turned out to be a teller of tales, a baseball fan, and someone who was never boring.  Turns out this was indeed someone I could grow old with, someone I could sit on a front porch with, surrounded by grandkids.  Blake always envisioned himself dispensing grandfatherly wisdom to an audience of upturned and adoring faces, but the grandchildren of real life don’t sit still long enough for long speeches.  And they’ve learned the same lesson I have...that Grandpa would rather spin a good yarn than tell the gospel truth…..

Hair-do-well

Was I a willing participant in the fads of my childhood?  

Well, I was a latecomer to the Beatles and all of rock 'n roll.  I remember kids talking about the Beatles when I was in grade school,  but until my best friend became obsessed with one of their songs (Come Together?  Hey Jude? After all these years, which song we listened to a thousand times escapes me....), I knew little of the Beatles outside of "She Loves You, Ya, Ya, Ya."

Exhibit A: 

Indeed, I wore bell bottom pants; my mother made me a pair of flowered wide leg pants when I was in junior high...and while I don't know if they made me a fashion plate,  I wore them for my most special occasions...like junior high skating parties...and I loved them.  As far as I know, no photographs exist of this outfit.

Exhibit B: 

Yes, I know the picture above was taken in 1981 when I was not only married, but had two kids.  Never the less, in this shot, I am not yet 25 years old and by modern standards, I would still be on my parents' health insurance, which means I would not be a 'grownup'. 

 So...as I was saying... enter exhibit B: the permanent.  On me.  The baby, girl, teen, and now,  woman, least likely to keep a curl in her hair. And believe me, it wasn't for lack of trying.  I remember waking up one morning as a young girl and finding my hair turned up at the end!  Eureka!  A curl!  The precursor to a pageboy!  Imagine my consternation and disappointment when I looked in the mirror and that upturned tendril turned out to be the result of sleeping too soundly...a truly errant 'wild hair'.   

That ill fated harbinger did not deter me from bucking fate and heredity.  No.  Over time, I used my mother's pink foam curlers, electric rollers, home perms, and finally, the chemically induced frizz produced by hours of stinking saturation under a hair dryer in a beauty parlor.  It was a strange desire for someone born with the uber straight hair featured in any black and white photo of the years I was growing up: whether the ultra individualistic unkempt and unwashed '60s or the 'do your own thing' '70s.  No, it was my fate to faint and pine over the Rococo curls of the 1980s...just as I embarked on the ultimate no frills journey of a housewife and mother....

Ok.  These pictures feature Julianne Moore and Jennifer Gray.  Compare these to the picture of me with two very cute little girls on a North Carolina beach in 1981.  The movie stars showcase the look I visualized.  And the tortured Medusa head in the snapshot is the best attempt man's ingenuity could accomplish with the resistant, recalcitrant pelt that is my hair.  Chalk this attempt up to the rampant hormones of a soon to be mama.  As a triumph of hope over experience...and fashion...my attempts to update my hairstyle...and nature...have to rank up there as exercises in futility.

Hairdo well?  Ne'er do well.