I think it’s fair to begin by saying that, as I write this, my hair is completely slathered in coconut oil and is currently clipped onto the top of my head and wrapped up in an old t-shirt.  It has been this way for the past two-and-a-half hours, and realistically, will probably be that way for another three.

If your gut reaction was somewhere between “That’s an odd way to spend a Saturday night,” and “That is downright bizarre,” you are probably among the 89% of people in the world that do not have curly hair.  (I can give you this math because I just looked it up.  Google is such a nifty thing…) If you are one of the 11%, and therefore among my curly haired sisters, this sounds perfectly normal to you.  Curly-haired folk fall into two camps: they that spend hours and hours trying to make their hair sleek and smooth like the straight-haired people of the world, and they that spend hours and hours trying to get their curls to behave in a civilized and attractive manner, rather than like an Exorsist-style version of Cousin It.  It’s very time consuming.

What you have to understand about curly hair, if you do not have it, is that curly hair has a life of its own, and nothing you can do will convince it to do anything other than exactly what it wants.  Oh, sure, you catch me on a day when it’s cooperating, it’s amazing.  But you don’t see all the mornings when I wake up and look in the mirror only to think, “Oh, why?!”  Straightening it is an involved, forty-five minute process that only lasts about an hour, until I walk into anything even moderately humid (say, past a drinking fountain…) Keeping it curly involves trying to tempt and cajole it into doing what you want, which is dicey at best.  I can do the exact same thing to my hair three days in a row, and I’ll get “Meh” hair on day one, “Smashing” hair on day two, and “I Just Put My Finger In A Light Socket” on day three.  It’s completely hit-and-miss.

Most of  my hair-care habits have been picked up from one of three sources:

1. A really smashing book called Curly Girl by Lorraine Massey. This was my first soirée into accepting my curly hair.  (If you have curly hair and have not read this book, you should stop reading this and go read it. Immediately.)
2. My African-American students who wear their hair the natural way.  They come in from swimming in gym class and we talk about how insane curly hair is if it gets wet and you don’t put in product, and they’re always like, “Miss D., what you really need to do is…” I’ve gotten some good stuff this way.
3. Pinterest.  (Because whenever do you not have Pinterest on a list like this?)

Pinterest tends to be my favorite lately, mostly because I like trying new stuff, and like every curly-haired girl of my acquaintance, I’m constantly on the quest for a miracle produce that will give me cinema-style perfection on a daily basis.  (This is totally impossible on the level of waking up at 3 a.m. on two hours of sleep with perfect make-up, but a girl can dream…)

Segue into the coconut oil and the t-shirt.  A Pinterest find, in this case.  It’s ridiculous and it might not work.  But it might.  And the article had 4/4 tried-it-and-loved-it hearts, so that’s something.  Of course, after I had this all slathered up, I read about how some people are really allergic to coconut oil and get horrible breakouts–with my luck, that will be me, but it will be an interesting object lesson.

My hair has gotten curlier as I’ve aged, but even in my teens, my hair was voluminous.  I came of age in the final seasons of Friends, where there was nary a curl or wave or even a hint of volume to be found.

While it’s nice that curly hair (along with brunettes, a membership card I also claim…) are finally back in fashion, having hair that could never be “cool” taught me a lot in those formative late-teens and early-twenties years.  I made peace with being me.  I will never be able to pull of all those sleek, polished looking up-dos.  It always looks, well, wrong and anyway, it would only last about ten minutes. But I like my curly hair.  It’s kind of crazy and everywhere and only marginally following the rules, which is kind of who I am as a person, really.  I only marginally believe in patterns and instruction manuals and believe top-down mandate protocol is open to a certain amount of, shall we say, interpreation. I’m kind of like my hair.  So I guess it’s no mistake that it’s growing out of the top of my head.

I have started finding a few gray hairs (a total moment of panic that would have been worth getting on camera…) mixed into my mass of curls lately.  They are a million times more curly than my “regular” tresses.  I hope this is an indication of what kind of old lady I’ll be one day–no Bea Arthur coif for me, no sir-ee.  I’m going to be that crazy old lady who is always coming up with wacky ideas and bending rules and doing all the things she wants to do.  That’s what curly hair says to me.  And I say, sign me up. 

So, tonight, I was conned into going to see the new, live-action Beauty and the Beast with a couple girlfriends of mine, and I was reminded (for about the fifteen billionth time) about how much I hate romance in fiction.  Hate it.  I will avoid it at all costs.  I will make up excuses not to go over when people are watching these movies.  I turn the channel when they are on T.V.  A friend lends me a book that clearly features a love story as a major plot (or sub plot), I’ll let it sit on my table for a month, then read a synopsis and give it back.  The rom-coms I own sit in a drawer, unwatched for I-don’t-know how many years.  I have a love-hate relationship with my darling Jane Austen.  So, let me state that again, emphatically: I HATE ROMANCE.

I hate it so passionately, because at my core, I am a hopeless romantic.  I read somewhere once that “Within the chest of every jaded cynic beats the heart of a hopeless romantic,” and I reckon that’s pretty much dead on.  I hate romance in books and films because it’s like a drug to my spirit–I get high on the idea that somewhere out there, there are men who are well-read and can quote Shakespeare (who are not my college English professors).  I get completely bombed on the reckless abandon with which love happens in fiction–the idea that someone sees the funny, quirky things about you and sees them not only as gems but encourages them.  (I will cite that moment when Belle gets that exquisite library, in the cartoon, in the stage show, in the new movie.  It doesn’t matter.  It is such a part of her character, that to me that moment is magical.  I confess I brushed away a literal tear of jealousy in the movie theatre tonight.)

Unfortunately, I am now too old and smart for this.  My little girl, princess days are long behind me.  I know what reality is–I pay bills and clean my bathroom and use a CrockPot and spend more hours than I could ever count dedicated to raising the children of other people.  I have learned that (let us be real) things that make heroines really awesome in books and film does not necessarily translate to great success to real life.

I recently celebrated my thirty-third birthday.  I know, those of you among my elders are thinking things like, “Oh, you’re such a baby,” and cognitively, I agree with you.  But for some reason, this birthday hit me hard.  I don’t know why.  It’s not a round age.  Thirty slipped into my life with zero doom-and-gloom.  This year, though, I started looking at my life, and began to panic.  I think it’s because I feel like I’m such a static person.  All around me, friends, family, have gotten married and started families, while I remain good ol’ reliable me, ready to help–the good friend, the good sister.  Though I’ve always wanted those things, I didn’t worry.  I guess it’s because I subscribe strongly to the idea that you should live the life God gives you, not mope around wishing for something different.  So I’ve done lots of cool things with my time.  I guess I (stupidly?) just figured that when it was right it would happen.

But, then tonight, I found myself sitting in the movie theatre, with my two friends who live in the suburbs and have their husbands and houses and three kids, and I felt lost.  I’m not a starry-eyed idealist all the time–I know that life is just hard.  You give up the right to sleep for about six years when you have a child.  Marriages are tough and your spouse will annoy you.  I have been a steady shoulder for each of them in some of those tough times.  I have walked with these two women, my friends, through illnesses and cancer scares and miscarriages and layoffs and broken furnaces.  But I have also walked with them through the new homes and babies and good report cards and anniversaries.  And through their list of important life events, I just…am.  Good ol’ me.  Always there to lend a hand.

I find myself under the  pressure of time, and the reality that, no only am I in a profession where a girl just doesn’t meet single men, but no one I know knows any single men.  (The whole online dating nightmare is a post filled with enough drama and mad comedy to fit in with your average middle school dance…that is for another day.)  I feel the rising fear of complications that accompany “geriatric pregnancies” (the phrase “geriatric” alone fills me with unabashed terror.)  It’s horrifying.  I panic about what will happen to me if I get seriously sick–who will go with me to the doctor?  Who will help me make hard decisions?  Of course, I know people do these things all the time.  I know that I’m not totally alone, that I have God on my side, but it’s a hard pill to swallow when you’re tired and frustrated and lonely.

The only way I know to avoid the irrational desire to get weepy and call my mom is to just…put my nose to the grindstone and get on with the business of my life.  If I don’t think about it, I’m pretty okay.  I do my job, have my social life, have my little stresses and little victories.  Life keeps on keepin’ on.

But movies and books (I mean, it was Beauty and the Beast tonight, for crying out loud.  It’s a ruddy fairy tale!) knock me off my rhythm.  They feed me that narcotic of people finding each other, and ordinary, lonely people who do not have to be alone anymore.  It’s intoxicating.    And as long as the high lasts, I imagine that maybe one day things will change for me.  But then the lights come back on, I get into my car, and the crash comes, because I am smart enough to know that it doesn’t work like that–not for me, anyway.

But (and someone else very smart said this) “Hope springs eternal.”  The most frustrating thing about being a romantic is that you can’t kill hope.  You can’t kill that stubborn little flame of “just maybe.”  I guess it’s a good thing.  It keeps life interesting.  It keeps you guessing.  I suppose it’s why God gave it to us–to keep us from giving up.  But, wow, is it tough.  Tough, but unbreakable–it’s the reason Jane Austen sits in a place of honor on my shelf, and why I can’t just give away those DVDs.  I guess it’s also why I love writing fiction–it may not happen for me, but in my fictional world, I can make it happen for someone else.  And that is a high in and of itself.

Getting a Golden Retriever was a lifelong dream of my father’s ever since he’d met and fallen in love with one as a child.  My mother was considerably more wary, on account of the only other dog in our family history, Cinder, being kind of a disaster. Cinder made a career of escaping from our backyard at every opportunity, which, given that our yard was the hub of neighborhood activity for all six of us kids and our myriad friends, happened frequently.  Basically, my father viewed a dog the way my mother viewed another baby. (My mom thinks of babies and sees first steps and dandelion bouquets and kindergarten plays and homemade cards.  My dad, on the other hand, sees designer jeans and out-of-state college tuition and expensive weddings with ice sculptures. )

Anyway, so the summer I went off to college, my mother finally relented and agreed to let my dad get this dog, and that is how Gracie Ellen came into our family.  We brought her home from the breeder a few weeks before I left for school, an adorable little golden fluff-ball who was ready to love all of us to bits.  She was sweet and gentle from the start, a trait she has never lost.

Being a retriever, she was constantly on the lookout for things to bring you to show she cared.  As a puppy, she would pull the socks out of people’s shoes and bring them over, tail waggling so fast her whole back half looked like it might come off.  Of course, it was adorable, and we praised her for it.  This proved to be a mistake, because she never gave up this habit, and, if you came into the room, she would frantically search around for socks to bring you.  Failing this, she would retrieve anything she could find in the laundry room–dish towels, t-shirts, double bed fitted sheets–and there were more than a few times she joyously trotted over to a guest in the house touting somebody’s underwear.

From her earliest, she was a dog with a radar for small children, old people, and anyone who might be feeling blue.  She’d be perfectly happy roughhousing with my brothers, but just has content to sit next to a stroller to have her ears tugged on by a toddler or be gently patted by a little white-haired lady in a wheelchair.

Gracie has had some adventures–like the time that she ate half a box of raisins and we all thought she was going to die (dogs, by the way, are deathly allergic to grapes and raisins).  The time we threw a stick in Lake Michigan and she didn’t see it behind her, and was well on her way east to the Michigan shore before somebody threw a rock in the water to get her to turn around.  The time she got stuck in gridlock with my dad in Chicago and had a marvelous time hanging her head out the window so other drivers could pet her.  The thirty-six hours in her whole life that she wasn’t with at least one member of our family, and the neighbors watching her were convinced she was dying because she was so violently ill. All the family walks we took and didn’t stay close together, and she would do her best to herd the family attached to the leash toward the stragglers.  All the times people had bad days and sad days and came home, where she’d sit next to them and let them cry on her fur. Her stories are many and live in the family lore and are told time and time again.

Gracie is old now–almost fifteen.  She has arthritis that makes it hard for her to walk.  She’s stone deaf.  Her stomach can’t handle dog food any more, so twice a day, she gets scrambled eggs and chicken and rice with cheese (and salt.  Once my dad forgot that, and my parents both swear she took one bite, stepped back and refused to touch it until he put the salt on it.)  She’s old  and slowing down.

I live near my parents now, and go over there pretty regularly.  I always stop and pet Gracie, who, even now, puts her head against your arm, and struggles up so she can come and sit by you and guard you from intruders (though what an arthritic, deaf dog with the sleep of the dead can do, I’m not quite sure.  But I’m sure she’ll do what she can.)  I’ll sit by her sometimes now, and pet her old, golden coat, brush her, and whisper in the ears that can’t hear any more that she’s the best dog in the whole world, and that I love her.  I do it because I know she won’t be around for much longer. Eventually, the day will come when I will go over to my parents’ house and she won’t be sleeping on the kitchen linoleum.  The old, white face won’t look up when I walk into the house, and the floppy, golden ears won’t perk up whenever I make a move toward the pantry.

I do it because she is my dog.  She saw me through the ups and downs of my college years.  She was a faithful friend when I graduated from college and didn’t know what I was going to do with my life.  She sat next to me five years later when I was longing for my China home, her head on my lap, big, brown eyes that said, “I’m sorry that being back in America is hard for you.”  Gracie has always been around when life got hard for me, so now, I figure I should return the favor.  I know she’s just a dog–she didn’t understand all the things that I went through, but in her own, canine way, she did her best to help.  I do it because she is the best dog.  She’s my dog.  And God let her be part of my life because He cares–even about the little things, like Golden Retrievers.