Big Red's Hair

Her white hair, once red, softens her drawn and softly wrinkled face. (How can a face be softly wrinkled? I don’t know, but the more wrinkled her face becomes the softer it gets.) I am glad we’ve stopped dying her hair, the red was becoming garish at one-hundred years of age – but the color was her trademark, her nick-name, Big Red, given by an aunt’s long ago boyfriend because of her beautiful auburn hair color. Little did that long ago boyfriend know, the hair color was courtesy of a Miss Clairol bottle. The color matched the braid she wore twisted into a bun (or a cow-patty, as some of us less respectful grandchildren called it) on top of her head. Few knew that the plaited bun was not her hair. I imagine generations of second graders thought Mrs. Owen’s hair, when unbound from the confines of her braid, hung down her back practically to her butt. (But I’m sure Mrs. Owen’s Catholic second graders would never think the word “butt.”) How shocked would they have been to see her remove the big sliver hair pins and take off her bun each night?

The braided bun has been a fixture in my life and on my grandmother’s head for as long as I can remember. I loved to watch her unbraid it, wash it, comb it out, and re-braid it. I was fascinated with this switch of hair. I liked to imagine it had once belonged to John Steinbeck’s “Little Red Pony,” but rumor had it that the hair was actually my grandmother’s own hair, cut off and made into a hair piece. This version was more romantic when I entered my teen years and left behind the horsetail theory. I imagined she cut her hair in sorrow over a lost love or perhaps when being forced to enter a convent. When I lived with her in my twenties I asked how she could have cut her long hair off. She laughed and told me the braid was ordered form a wig maker.

She had a few braid escapades over the years. Once, driving home from school, exhausted from staying too late in her classroom grading papers or preparing lessons, she unpinned her bun and set it on the passenger seat of her car. The next morning she searched the house for her bun, not finding it. She reconciled herself to arriving at school with a bun-less head. How relieved she was to find it when she got into her car. Imagine the horror and trauma she spared those second graders.

One night while sitting up grading papers (my grandmother could wrap the planet with all the papers she graded while sitting in bed), she began to smell something burning. She would get up to investigate the burners on the stove, or the pilot on the water heater, but each time she got back to her paper grading she would smell the acrid odor of fire. On her next foray into the kitchen to find the source, she noticed, as she passed her bureau mirror, that her head was smoking. She hadn’t removed her bun and it had been in contact with the bulb of the reading lamp illuminating the homework assignments she was marking with her red ink pen. She had to un-braid and re-braid the bun that night to hide the scorched hair.

As she aged and her own hair grew thinner it was harder and harder to attach the heavy bun to her head. There were many occasions when a bun avalanche was averted at the last minute by a half dozen more hair pins. Eventually the bun was put away and my grandmother’s trademark was gone. But she still insisted on coloring what was left of her hair the same auburn red it had been since she was a child. She continued to dye her hair until her one-hundredth year. I guess one-hundred is as good a time as any to go gray. I plan to follow her lead. Someone needs to keep Miss Clairol in business.