On the Color of My Hair

By: Susan

I got my first gray hair when I was twenty one.  I knew then that someday I would have a completely gray head.  I have never been comfortable with wearing too much make-up.  I feel like I am pretending to be someone else and everyone knows it.  I do admire women who have the patience and the talent to enhance their natural beauty and always look well-put together.  But I can't handle it.  I don't have the stamina for it.  In my thirties, the number of gray hairs became too many to just pull out and I had to make a decision about whether to color my hair or not.  My husband, who usually has no opinion about appearances, pointed out that since our children were very small, maybe they would want their mother to look young for a while longer.  I listened and for the next twenty five years I covered my grays with a color very close to my natural dark brown.  But as I said, I am not good with anything that requires maintenance and more often than not my roots would begin to show before I had a chance to buy another box of hair color.  Several times over the past few years I threatened to let my hair go gray but changed my mind as a special occasion or a work presentation came up.  This past Fall, I went to a convention in Minneapolis to be part of a roundtable with my writing partners and I did not color my hair in time! Once I had presented myself to strangers with gray roots growing, there was no going back.  

As my hair has turned completely natural, with lots of white around my face and salt and paper in the back, I have been getting compliments from friends and co-workers.  My friend Paulette, who is a beauty in her natural hair, made a point of telling me how much she liked my hair color.  Others that I usually don't interact with come up to me and say how beautiful my hair looks.  Even my mother, who is an expert in style and beauty, approves of my look.

The response from other Persian women, however, has been very strongly negative. With a great sense of concern friends pull me aside and tell me that I am too young to let myself go.  Those who haven't seen me for a while, cannot hide their shock. I am surprised at how comfortable people have felt letting me know of their disapproval.  All this has made me very curious.  What is it about my decision that is so upsetting?  I know that they truly care about me but could it also be a little bit about their own vanity?  Have I let the cat out of the bag that most Persian women are not naturally blonde? And they would probably look like me if they didn't dye their hair regularly? I promise I do not mean any offense.  I am no one to judge others.  As I said, I admire women who have take the time to enhance their beauty.  But this is me.  I like me this way.  And my husband and kids like me this way too. And that's all I care about. 

Reserve Judgement by Carolyn

Last weekend I inadvertently traumatized my younger son, Kyle, who has just celebrated his 30th birthday. Here's how it came about . . .

A bunch of my family members had gathered to watch my great-nephew's soccer game. I was holding my grandson, Jude, who is 13 months old. He was very eager to get down and toddle around, which was not possible because of the soccer game in progress directly in front of us. I remarked that we needed a leash for him like the one I had used for Kyle when he was a toddler. When he overheard that, Kyle was incensed. "Mother!" he shouted. "How could you do that to me?"

I tried to calm him down. "Son. I was trying to keep you safe." Kyle was an energetic child, to say the least. He did not appreciate lounging in the comfort of a stroller. He wanted down. He was also an escape artist. He could wriggle out of the stroller straps in the blink of an eye. He was curious and fearless as well. He took off in a shot whenever he saw the least opportunity . . . down the street,  across the store, anywhere. (Actually, all of this is still true about him, even as an adult, although I haven't actually tried to keep him strapped in a stroller in many, many years.)

So, with the trouble I had keeping him contained (and with another son just 23 months older to also keep under control), in desperation I bought a leash especially created for children. I tried explaining that to Kyle last Saturday. "Son. It wasn't a dog leash. It was made to keep children safe." In spite of my explanation, he still seemed shocked and resentful. Discussing it at the soccer game reminded me of the affronted looks and snide remarks I used to get from other people when they saw me with my toddler son on a leash. Even with logical and valid reasons, there seems to be something innately shocking about the idea of having a child on a leash. I'm not sure why. We think it is perfectly fine to keep our dogs safe by using leashes. Shouldn't we be as careful with our children? Maybe we think it looks like we haven't successfully taught them to sit still and behave themselves if we resort to such measures. I freely admit I was not totally successful in that area when my children were toddlers. Toddlers are hard-wired to want to move around and explore.

Every few minutes for the duration of the soccer game, Kyle exclaimed, "Mother! Really! A leash?" or something similar. At one point, he launched into a discussion of how he was going to do it differently when (if) he has children. He told us he was going to discuss the need for safety with his toddler and use reasoning to keep his child safe instead of (gasp!) a leash. We all laughed heartily at those unenlightened remarks. We'll see.

After we all went our separate ways on Saturday, I was rather worried that Kyle was still upset over the whole incident. From listening to him that day, you would have thought that I had just informed him that we had found him living in a den with a pack of wolves when he was an infant and hadn't ever told him until just then. Fortunately, he called a couple of days later to chat. Before we got off the phone, he assured me that, while he had been surprised to be told of his time on a leash, he had mostly been exaggerating his horror to entertain the group. I breathed a sigh of relief. As a parent, you hate to think you have caused your child (even a grown child) horrible trauma. Just before we ended our phone conversation, I told him, "Well, if you decide you need therapy to get over this, I will pay for it." :)

I Heart My Public Library

By: Susan

I got an email last night that I had a hold available at the Cedar Park Library.  So after work and my run with my friend Andrea, I made sure I stopped by to pick up Drum Dream Girl: How One Girl's Courage Changed Music.  It's a picture book with only some thirty pages but it is filled with lush illustrations done by Rafael López and thanks to Margarita Engle, I learned about a Chinese-African-Cuban girl who wanted to play the drums at a time when girls were told that only boys were allowed.  I got on the Internet and looked up the band she played with and listened to their music and in a matter of an hour, my world grew a little more.  That's why I love libraries, this most democratic of institutions where anyone can enter a community of knowledge and learning.  So here is a piece I wrote over ten years ago about one special woman who tried to create such an environment in a place where free thinking and young minds were (and unfortunately, still are) considered a dangerous combination:

My current books on loan from the Cedar Park Library

The Woman Who Took Away the Locks

In 1976, I was an eighth grader living in Tehran, Iran.  The previous year, the Shah, the King of Iran, had put in place a universal mid-morning snack program, where milk, juice and cake or cookies were given out to children at 10:00 a.m. every morning in every school in the country.  My affluent classmates, however, having had a full breakfast, sometimes found other uses for the snack items. Once when a policeman was hit by a milk carton thrown from a second story window, our new assistant principal, Mrs. Momeni came in to give our class a lecture.  She was new to our school and we had not quite figured her out yet.  She didn't shout or insult.  She just told us about the school where she had come from.  It was one in the south side of the city, the poor side, where if a child was absent, his mother would come to collect his snack because that was his only meal for the day.  She suggested that if we did not need the milk or the cake, she would gladly collect them and take them to those children.  I don't know how her message affected the other kids, but for me it was my first encounter with social consciousness.

I guess the school's administration found those remarks too inflammatory.  Next year, Mrs. Momeni got a demotion; she became the librarian.  You have to know about our library to understand why being the librarian was a step down.  The library was on the top floor of the school, where only the upperclassmen had occasion to pass by it.  It was no larger than a medium-sized classroom with bookcases all around and tables and chairs in the middle.The bookcases held old textbooks, some classical books of poetry and used English books, discarded at the end of each year by students who never really learned to read them.  The most notable part of the library was the locks on the glass doors of each bookcase.  The library was where you went if the teacher was absent.  It was where you were sent if you misbehaved.  Sort of a detention hall.  So you see, being the librarian was more like being a monitor, a baby sitter.  I think the administrators were fooled by Mrs. Momeni's small stature and quiet demeanor.  As soon as she got the job, she took off the locks, boxed away the old textbooks and put up a sign for a membership drive:  Bring a book and join the library.  Join the library? My only other attempt to join a library had been in fifth grade when a small one opened in a park near my house and I had to bring permissions from my parents and the school principal to join.  My parents readily agreed, thinking this way they would have some help satisfying my appetite for books.  The elementary school principal, however, thought that such extra-curricular activities would interfere with my academic studies and would not sign the permission slip.  So you can imagine my excitement at the news of being able to join a library by only donating a book.

That year was one of the most memorable years of my life.  My friends and I would hang out at the library every chance we got.  We devoured the new books, got to know new authors, Iranian, European, American.  The best book I read that year was a collection of short stories called When the Fish have Died by an Iranian woman, Zhilah Sazegahr.  The title story was about a fish that was deprived of water so gradually that it got used to living without it.  When it was thrown back into its bowl, it drowned.  But the best part of reading was talking about books with my friends and Mrs. Momeni.  We each had our favorites, and in each book a favorite character.  We talked about them so much, they would become real people in our lives.  At the end of that year, Mrs. Momeni decided to give a prize to those who had read the most books.  I was one of them.  For the prizes, she chose books by Sadegh Hedayat.  Hedayat was an existential Iranian writer who had committed suicide in Paris in the thirties.  Rumor had it that his books were so dark that those who read them would be driven to end their lives.  You can imagine the school's response to the choice of these books as reading awards!  Next year the library was moved to an annex building next to the nurse's office and the janitor's supply room.

That was 1978.  The political situation in the country was getting worse every day.  There were demonstrations in the University across the street from our school.  Banks and cinemas were being burned every week as symbols of the decadent West.  The Shah's secret police was losing its grip on the opposition.  My family left the country in November of that year.  We came to Houston, Texas where I had a cousin.  I started school right away.  One day, the teacher assigned a paper in history class.  Over the weekend, I went to the public library to do the research.  First thing I noticed was that there were not glass doors or locks on the shelves.  Timidly, I asked the lady at the reference desk if I could use the books since I was not a member.  She said: "Of course, you just can't check any out unless you have a library card."  I feasted on rows and rows of Encyclopedias and reference books.  When I was done with my school assignment, I sneaked into the fiction section.  I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting someone to come and ask for my card and not finding one throw me out or worse, report me to the authorities.  But no one came.

Before leaving, I took a chance and asked the librarian what it took to get a library card.  She gave me an application to fill out and it only had space for one signature.  Mine.

The Dish on My Dogs, Part One by Carolyn

As you know by now, I live with three dogs. This is something that I both regret and celebrate every day. Any pet owner will understand what I mean. Let me tell you about Finn, the elder statesman of the group.

Finn (aka Finnegan McCool) is a rescue dog. He is a poodle mix -- the "mix" part is a mystery. I found him at a shelter (where they had named him Kevin, which doesn't feel at all like a dog name to me, but I guess they run out of good ones eventually). When I first met him, he looked pretty funky, because the shelter worker who tried to groom him had apparently gotten distracted and quit halfway through the job - he was shaved on one half of his body and hairy on the other. But still, he was beautiful to me.

Finn is one of the mildest-mannered dogs I know -- very laid-back. He cuddles with anyone indiscriminately. If you have a lap, he wants to be on it. When he wants to be petted, he nudges your hand with his nose, insistently, but doesn't claw at you like some dogs I could mention. One of his favorite things to do is to smell "people breath", the stinkier the better. When he first meets someone he stands up and sniffs their mouth. This can be a little startling, but if they will accommodate him by exhaling in his face, he will be ecstatic. He will wag his little nub of a tail, which is unbearably cute.

He is mostly white, with large splotches of black here and there, like someone spilled ink on him. He has poodle-kinky hair, so petting him feels like it felt when you laid down on top of your grandmother's bed, which was covered with a chenille bedspread, soft and nubby and comforting.

Finn can be strangely creepy-looking, though. He has a way of looking at you sideways which looks like he is giving you the evil eye. It makes you suspect he is plotting something against you. It can be quite disconcerting, but I assure you, there is no malice in his soul. Really. He is a lover, not a fighter.

Finn is kind of a floppy dog, with fairly long legs. Once my children propped him up in the recliner like he was sitting up and mocked him, laughing at his pink belly sticking out over his hind legs. They even took photos. I think that was cruel and may have psychologically scarred Finn for life.

Finn is the perfect dog except for two small flaws. He was three years old when I adopted him, and had not been neutered. Although he is neutered now, he still retains that boy-dog need to mark everything in sight. He has definitely peed on every piece of furniture in the house. He has peed on every square inch of the back yard, I'm sure. He even pees on his doggie sisters when he gets a chance. It is terribly embarrassing at the dog park when he hikes his leg to pee on a doggie stranger.

The other flaw is more serious: Finn is an escape artist. I should have named him Houdini. He regularly escapes from the back yard, either digging under the fence or squeezing through loose slats. He also streaks through the front door when the pizza delivery man comes, or I am trying to leave for work, or whenever he sees the opportunity. I cannot even count the times I have chased that dog through the neighborhood. The really irritating part is that when he sees me following him, he turns around and runs the other way. He just doesn't want his adventure to end!

Once I enlisted two complete strangers to help me; one to go down one street while I went down the other, and one to head Finn off at the pass. They must have thought I was bonkers, especially since I was in my pajamas and slippers at the time.

Just last weekend, there were six of us in the backyard. We unhooked Finn from his lead and headed into the house, talking about which trees needed trimmed. After a few minutes I realized Finn was not in the house with the rest of the dogs. Sure enough, he took advantage of our momentary distraction with the trees and squeezed out the fence into the big, exciting world. I can just imagine him thinking, "If I just veer off a little and casually stroll down the side of the house, they won't even notice . . . " We immediately mobilized the troops to search in two different directions, and found him fairly quickly, happily trotting down the street.

Other times I have not found him so quickly. Many times I have searched in vain and been sure that he was gone forever. Fortunately, someone has always found him and called me to come pick him up. He always charms his rescuers, and they tell me, "Oh, he's so cute!" Sometimes I am tempted to say, "Yes, he is cute. Would you like to keep him?" But I haven't -- at least not yet.

Have Passport, Will Travel

If you need a passport, let me recommend the best place to get one in Austin:  The International Office at the University of Texas on 2400 Nueces.  And I can confidently say I know all about passports and the pain and suffering that can be involved in getting one.

My first passport was as a family.  We must have gotten it the first time we traveled to Europe in 1975.  It had a group picture of my mother, my brother and me.  That's the passport I used to enter the US in 1978 when we moved here permanently.  When it expired, I tried to get an individual one.  By then the Islamic Republic was in power and in order to apply for an Iranian passport 1) I had to submit a picture of myself with a head scarf and 2) I had to declare my belief in the Baha'i Faith on the application.  My application was rejected 1) because I was a Baha'i and 2) the scarf did not sufficiently cover my head and a small triangle on my neck was exposed where I had tied the scarf.  I gave up on trying to get an Iranian passport because I wasn't about to change either of those two conditions and I didn't have any imminent travel plans anyway.  In 1982 I got married and we had hoped to travel to Ecuador for our honeymoon.  I found out that as a permanent resident of the United States I was entitled to get a travel document that would allow me to travel to most places in this world.  However, in order to get this semi-passport I had to claim that I was stateless, that no country recognized me as its citizen.  The idea was just too uncomfortable for my nineteen year old self to accept.  So I refused to get the travel document and we didn't go to Ecuador.  In 1983, I traveled to Mexico, which at the time did not require a passport from US residents.  It was the joy and excitement of that  trip that made me realize I must always be able and ready to travel. I decided that I was willing to be stateless in order to see the world.  By then the Iranian government had made it very clear that the it did not consider Baha'is citizens with full rights anyway.  They were, and are to this day, denied such basic rights as education, employment, freedom to practice and in many cases life itself.  In 1985 I got my travel document so Ben and I could take our first trip to South America. We were able to finally visit not only Ecuador, but Peru, Bolivia and Panama as well.  At about the same time, I started my application for US citizenship. In 1987 when we traveled to Israel I was a full-fledged-US-passport-carrying citizen.  My place of birth will always be Iran, so from time to time I am subjected to extra scrutiny at borders and airports.  That initial passport served me well.  In 1988 we spent six months traveling around the world from Europe to what was then the Soviet Union, to China, Japan and Thailand, before settling in Venezuela.

My children who were born in Venezuela  were entitled to dual citizenship and carried two passports as long as we lived there.  That meant at one point our family of six carried ten passports!  Getting the US passport in Venezuela was not always difficult or complicated.  With the first two kids, the embassy happened to make visits to the town in the interior where we lived, twelve hours drive from the capital.  With the other two, we had to travel to Caracas.  Getting the Venezuelan passport was a whole other story.  It usually involved getting in line very early and staying there for the better part of the day, with no assurance of success.

As a rule and regardless of country, passport officials are not known for their friendliness or efficiency.  I don't know what it is.  Are they jealous that you are traveling and they're not? Are they resentful that you are choosing to leave the country?  I have stood in lines at 4:00 a.m. to apply for a passport.  I have been sent back because the picture wasn't the right size, because both parents had to be present, because I signed on the wrong spot and once because the country ran out of passport booklets!  In the US, certain post offices process passport applications.  Some work by appointment but the next appointment may be weeks from now.  Some are walk-ins but that means you have to arrive hours early to be the first in line.

Last August my two younger children needed to renew their passports.  The day I had planned to take them for the renewal was not the most convenient day.  They had other plans. Why do we need a new passport now, they asked.  We are not going anywhere.  My husband reminded them that no Hansen shall ever be without a valid passport because the opportunity for travel may happen at any moment.  Sure enough that same week my eldest was asked to travel to Canada on short notice and I had to send her passport to her in Boston by USPS.

After thirty some years of painful passport processing experiences I am happy to have found a place that is friendly and efficient; they take your picture right there and make their own photocopies of your documents.  So if you need a passport, go to the International Office at the University of Texas at Austin.  A few weeks ago, I accompanied my oldest daughter to this same office so she could renew her passport before she moved overseas once again.  The very helpful, and very knowledgable-despite-her-youth clerk told us that as long as your passport hasn't actually expired, you can renew it by mail. This saved us money and some time. Now I have to decide whether I should wait for my passport to expire this summer so I can have a chance to go down there and experience their efficiency and friendliness one more time, or should I just renew it by mail?

Last Trip to Hospital by Carolyn

Within our writers' group, Esmer is the only one of us whose default writing genre is fiction. Susan, Andrea, and I tend to write more memoirs, anecdotes, and personal essays. We are rather envious of the ease with which Es cranks out beautifully written fiction, so we decided to stretch ourselves a little with some writing exercises. The challenge at our last writers' group meeting was to grab a nearby book, find a specified page number and count down to a particular line, then to use that line as the beginning of a new piece of writing. We tried it and enjoyed it so much that we tried it again. Here is the piece I wrote in response to the 11th line on p. 116 of Fingal O'Reilly, Irish Doctor, by Patrick Taylor, which happened to be on my coffee table at our meeting:

“And let’s hope,” said O’Reilly, “this’ll be your last trip to hospital for quite awhile.” That was the best he could come up with after hearing the tale O’Bannon had just told him. 

“Well,” the old man had started, “there I was, just minding my own business, settled in with a cold one on the whittlin’ bench outside O’Leary’s Store, jawin’ with MacInness, when all the commotion started. We heard bangs and booms and blaring horns, but we couldn’t see nothing at first. After a while, it hove into sight: a raggedy old tractor, belchin’ smoke, with a crazed bull at the wheel. Our eyes about popped out of our heads, I can tell you! The back tires were flat, shootin’ sparks and draggin’ the fence wire and posts the tractor musta driven across. The fence posts were bouncing up and down, setting the chickens tangled up in them to squawkin’ and fussin’. I guess the front of the tractor had picked up one of them big metal trash cans, cause it were a-spinnin’ along in front, caught on the cattle guard. About the time we thought we had figured out what had happened, maybe the bull trying to romance the tractor, cause that old bull of MacMasters’ has always been purt near blind, the bull hooked a horn through the steering wheel and made a sharp right turn up on to the sidewalk where we were sittin’ and spittin’. Well, MacInness is a mite younger than I am, so he jumped up real spry and took a flying leap out of the way of the incoming tractor. You know that I just got out of the hospital with this dad-burned busted leg I got when I fell off the ladder tryin’ to fix the cistern. It was still in a cast, and I been walking with a cane, so between that and the stitches still healin’ from the hernia surgery a couple weeks ago, I was just stuck there like stone, waitin’ for disaster to strike. And it sure-enough did. The bull was bawlin’, the chickens were squawkin’, the trash can was clangin’, and the fence posts were thumpin’ and bumpin’ as the tractor jumped the curb and plowed through O’Leary’s front window, takin’ me with it.”

“I don’t rightly remember what happened after that because of the concussion, but folks say that the trash can on the cattle guard scooped me up inside itself and flew up over the front of the tractor, hittin’ the bull smack-dab in the forehead. That was a good thing, since the blow knocked him out and the tractor finally stalled out right there in the middle of O’Leary’s soda fountain. The bad part was that the trash can bounced off the bull’s head and impaled itself on his horns, so when he slumped over unconscious, the trash can went with him. We rolled on out of the big hole the tractor had plowed into the wall and out into the street. Normally that wouldn’t be too much of a problem, ‘cause you know we don’t get much traffic around here, but someone had called the sheriff because of all the ruckus, so he was just pullin’ up in front when we barrelled out. The trash can hit the squad car just under the front bumper and rolled on under a little ways. The car high-centered on the trash can and wobbled there for a bit before settlin’ down and squashin’ it. MacInness told me that they had to bring in the jaws of life from way over in the county seat to pull me out of there! I woke up back in the hospital for the third time this month because that gol-darned bull got a little frisky with the tractor!” Old O’Bannon finally took a breath and looked at O’Reilly expectantly.

“And let’s hope,” said O’Reilly, “this’ll be your last trip to hospital for quite awhile.”

Four More Letters from The Encyclopedia of Me! by Andrea

T is for Teacher

From one of my fourth grade boys...
beast or best, I'll take it!

Oh noble profession it is!  Typically within five minutes of meeting someone, they will know that I am a teacher.  Because I will tell them, directly or through an anecdote about life with my school kids.  I acknowledge I am one of the lucky few who gets to do challenging work everyday and absolutely love it!  In the early years, I would be at school or at home working up to 16 hours a day most days. I have shortened my hours significantly in the last few years, with long hours reserved for the beginning and end of the term.  Though I enjoy almost every aspect of the work (NO MORE EMAIL!), my joy comes from reaching to kids' hearts as a means of reaching to their minds. This makes the few unpleasantries of the job insignificant in comparison. I do believe a part of my life’s mission on Earth is to teach.  I am grateful to have a vocation in which there is such an enormous return on my investment.

U is for Useful

When I exit this world, I hope one thing others will note about me is that I made use of my time here to do something good. I want people to say I used the unique strengths, talents and my hang-ups, too, to make an eternal mark on as many endeavors I could.  I am not there yet, but maybe writing this long-standing desire will help me to focus and do all the good things I was put here to do.

V is for Vegetables

Next to chicken wings and apples, vegetables are my favorite things to eat.  And I love them raw.  Give me some sweet bell peppers, cucumber spears, big heaping bowls of salad with ingredients in every color of the rainbow and you will have one happy lady.  I would take a bowl of grape tomatoes and carrot sticks over chocolate cake any day.  The only veggie I have found that I do not particularly crave is sweet peas.  Something about that one just isn’t right. Squishy and sweet are not my idea of a tasty combination in a vegetable.  Cake balls maybe, sweet peas.  Don’t get me wrong I will eat them, but I have to gear myself up and prepare my mind...and my mouth.

W is for Writing (to See Me)
Taking time to analyze the small details that make me me in the confines of the alphabet has been an exercise in divergent thinking. I often think of myself as pretty one-dimensional, not very multi-faceted. Though many of these vignettes, anecdotes and quips are not examples of my best writing, they do serve as small reflections of who I am when I am not looking. If I can see myself a little differently here, maybe during my times of doubt and insecurity, I will be able to remember that I am not without depth and edges or nooks and crannies. As small as they may be, they still are making me ME.


Take a moment and think about the small things in your life, mind and heart which make you YOU. Now go write them down, in alphabetical order.

-Andrea