“Oh well a Touch Of Grey
Kind of suits you anyway.
That was all I had to say
It’s all right.”

I’m not really a Grateful Dead fan. I appreciate the band as an American icon and like some of their music, but not a fan in the sense of being a Deadhead and wanting to sway back and forth barefoot in a long batik print skirt and with no bra whenever I hear one of the band’s songs.

However, the lyrics have been in my head since midweek.

Youke’s 11th birthday is a week away.

Despite being around for over a decade, Youke is still very puppy-like in appearance in many ways. He’s still in fantastic condition and surprisingly doesn’t have any grey. Or if he does, it’s well hidden among his freckles and spots. But his eyes are starting to cloud and I’ve noticed a slight, but definite shift in his body, especially when I look at pictures from his younger days.

The cloudy eyes though in no way impact his Ball catching abilities. Still the best damn catcher. Unlike Brady.

It’s a good thing Brady is awesome at agility because while he loves to play Ball, he sucks at catching Balls. Seriously, he’d have been cut from the line-up a long time ago if I was relying on his ability to catch anything. He also cannot catch food tossed at him with any percentage of accuracy.

This is a crappy photo because Brady is best photographed by a professional and not by me and because I dropped my phone the other day and cracked the photo lens. But it does show how he’s becoming increasingly grey.

I also recently had to drop his jump height when we play NADAC agility because of the organization’s rules. Dogs nine years old must register as veterans and there’s a mandatory drop in jump height for dogs that jump 20 inches, Brady’s category. That change hit me hard. Not because I’m opposed to the rule. I think the rule has its place. At least for everyone except me and Brady. Our first trial with the reduced height and in the veterans division was a few months ago and I was sorta sad the entire trial. I really do not want my feisty crazy Red Dog to be getting older.

Speaking of crazy and feisty.

She’s laying on top of the fourth Ball. Because she’s a Ball hoarder.

Camm has some new flecks of white on her face too these days. Magically, when she became seven years old in November, she remained insanely crazed, but gained some steady listening skills. I love me some Camm, but middle-aged Camm is especially awesome.

Mostly I’ve been thinking about the Grateful Dead song because I made a huge decision last week.

I’m going grey.

In dog years, Youke is older than me, but he can still leap a lot higher and run a lot faster.

Because I’ve been so crazy busy for the past couple of months, I’ve had to reschedule my cut and color appointments on a frequent basis. I rescheduled my last appointment twice and finally was able to get in this past Friday. Even then, I very nearly rescheduled again.

All that waiting allowed me to take a good look at my roots. My hair grows very fast. That had benefits, but it also means that I really needed color touch ups every four weeks in an ideal world, but in mine I was going about every five weeks, sometimes six weeks.

I started going grey in my early 30s. I started coloring in my mid-30s. Once I started coloring, I experimented a lot. At first I went safe and was merely trying to cover the grey with something close to my own natural hair color. But I played with blonde-ish and with red-ish for a while too. I went back to very dark for a long time, including an unfortunate era where I stopped going to a salon professional and did it myself from a box. Eventually, it became clear that trying to maintain my natural dark brunette was a losing proposition and I went very light for a few years.

Truth be told, while I knew I was greying, I really had no clue as to how much and where. I did know I was very white at the front of my face, but have had no clue as to how much of my natural dark color might still be blended in.

So, last week I had a bit of an epiphany. I just don’t have the time, and frankly, the funds to spend, on monthly color maintenance. I’ve been contemplating the idea of just letting myself go grey for the past few years anyway.

Last Friday, Angela, my stylist, did not fight me on my decision, Instead, she have me some options. In the end, I had her chop off several inches and she worked some kind of magic potion to help with the transition and to tone down the remaining darkness from dye.

As she worked on me, I could sense her growing amazement. She deliberately kept the chair turned away from the mirror. She also kept warning me I was going to look very different.

I think I screamed a little when she finished and finally turned the chair around, allowing me to confront the mirror. The scream wasn’t because I was horrified. I actually liked it. But it was so very different.

This will be a fantastic experiment. I have no idea how much grey, actually white, I have. I have no idea how this will look.

Nevertheless, I am pleased to see that I seem to have inherited not only my mother’s premature grey, but also her gorgeous silvery-white grey. Not that yellow grey. The kind of silvery-white grey that some women pay for.

But here’s the thing. If I end up hating it, I’ll just go back to coloring again for a while. I just vowed a long time ago I wasn’t going to be one of those women in my 60s, 70s or even 80s that was still dying her hair.

However, I will be one of those women in my 60s, 70s, and even 80s that will be running a crazy long-strided fast border collie. Sorry, while I generally agreed with Prince, sometimes you should act your shoe size.

Got fast running shoes Human?