Two thousand and seven was a hard time to find a good cup of coffee in Starkville, Mississippi. I settled for McDonalds.

 “Mornin! What can I getcha?” A tall, brown-skinned, bubbly woman asked from behind the counter.

 “A cup of coffee please.” She smiled. “That’ll be 59 cents.”

 The coffee, company and cost were not bad, so I went back the next day. On day three, I ordered at the drive through.  $1.35 popped up on the screen.

 “Oh no,” I spoke up. “I want the 59 cent coffee.”

 “OK.” SNR coffee $.59 appeared on the screen. “Wait; what's SNR coffee?”

 “Senior citizen coffee.”

 I pulled around and parked. 

 My favorite McDonald’s employee greeted me, “Mornin!” I smiled. “Morning. I need to clear something up. The past few days you've been giving me the senior citizen discount. I know I have gray hair, but I am only 27 years old.”

 “Oh, really?” She looked me over.  “Twenty-seven? Well, “I’m sorry.” She giggled and said, “But Girl - you know you white folks all look the same.”

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When I was fourteen, I found my first gray hair. My Momma did what most mommas would have done. She plucked the first few and then took me right down to Marguerite at the Avant Garde Salon.

 “We’ll take care of this,” Marguerite said. She handed me a catalog of hair colors. “Pick one.”

 Momma exhaled. I felt embarrassed and famous at the same time. None of the other girls my age were getting their hair dyed. “When I am done,” Marguerite said as she winked at me and whispered in the crowded salon, “You’ll blend right in. No one will ever know.”

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Nine years later I attended one of those self- care conferences in Atlanta. You know the type. You arrive insecure, lost in life, maybe a little depressed, and the conference promises to cure all your problems in one weekend. It just so happened that my gray roots were showing. I would have scheduled a hair appointment to cover them up, but I was busy and broke and new to the world of paying for everything on my own. At almost $150 a pop at the salon, all this “covering up and hiding” was getting expensive.

 So there I was in the conference’s bathroom trying to explain my gray hair to two ladies.

 “Whatever you do, don’t pluck them,” I said, pointing to my exposed gray roots, which were brightly shining next to my dyed auburn hair. My plucking joke fell flat. Lady one chuckled slightly and walked out.

“Hmm,” Lady two said. She was still listening. 

“Maybe the gray hair is because I am wise,” I offered.

 Lady two was the keynote speaker at the conference. She was shamanic, a healer, an energy workin type of lady. “Oh child,” She said, looking at my face; and then at my gray roots, and then back at my face again. “It is not because you are wise.” 

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Soon after that I ran into my friend Austin in Boone on a street corner. He hugged me, and then asked, “Angie, why are you hiding?”

“What are you talking about?”

 He pointed to my gray roots, “Your gray hair is beautiful. Why are you hiding it?”

 As soon as we parted ways, I went to Walgreens, bought a box of Garnier’s color 53, and started covering my gray roots back up. I squirted some color onto my scalp. The fumes from the dye seeped down and stung my eyes. My scalp tingled in a bad way. 

I stopped.

What was I doing?  Why was I putting something onto my head that burned? I looked in the mirror. Why was I hiding?

I washed the dye out, went to a salon and asked a stylist to cut all my dyed hair off. She looked at me like I was crazy, but she started cutting right down to the outer gray tips of my natural hair.

I teared up as I watched my hair fall to the floor in huge clumps. When she finished, I touched my head and ran my fingers through my little buzzcut. This was it. No more hiding. I had gone gray.

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Recently, my 4-year-old daughter Ella and I stood together in my bathroom.  We were preparing for a date night.  Her date was imaginary. My date was with her father. I combed my now long gray hair one last time, smiled at my reflection in the bathroom mirror and put my hairbrush in the drawer.

 “Momma, I want my hair to be like yours,” she said.

 “Well, you just might get that chance one day,” I told her. I bent down to where she was standing on her stool, looked her in the eyes and said, “Either way, your hair is always beautiful no matter what color it is.”