I have more grey hairs than my host mother.
August 6, 2011
I had a fun conversation with my host mom this afternoon while we were sitting waiting for her bread to cook in the oven. After a lull in the chatting, she suddenly announced, “Tshibt! You’re grey!” She had had this revelation one time before, during the Big Holiday last November, but I guess my now-multiplied number of grey hairs stood out even more today.
On and on she went about how more and more hairs on my head are grey and white, calling my whole head grey because of the ten or twenty or so hairs that stand out as no longer being black (brown, really). It’s funny, because she’s almost exactly ten years older than me and she doesn’t have a single grey hair on her head. My host dad, who’s about 50, has a couple times more than I do, but he’s far from grey.
The highlights from the conversation include when she pointed out that upon my arrival to Morocco, I didn’t have any grey hairs at all, but by the time I leave my whole head will be white. Discussing the state of my parents’ hair, she seemed to sympathize with me in having inherited my dad’s hair–I don’t remember a time when he wasn’t completely grey–rather than my mother’s, which only has a few touches of grey these days.
She also told me I should now resort to dying my hair with black henna like the other old ladies.
Safi, shibH–That’s all now, I’m grey and old.
