Color me blonde

In some ways I'm a late bloomer.

For example, I started drinking coffee in my mid-30s. That is pretty impressive considering I never liked the smell or taste up until that point. Coffee wasn't the cool thing to drink until recently. Now, you see drive-up coffee stations everywhere. They dot the landscape just like fast-food restaurants.

I limit myself to one ice-coffee drink a week or every two weeks. I really got hooked on them the day before my wedding. My husband's aunt, Sandy, my good friend, Niki, and I were doing some last-minute shopping that day and decided to have a late lunch at McDonald's. It was on that fateful day, two years ago to be exact, that I fell madly in love with an ice-coffee drink. And it was all purely by accident. A customer decided he or she didn't want the drink for some reason and one of the employees was trying to give it away. Needless to say, I took it and the rest is history.

For my 39^th birthday, I decided to try something that I'd never tried before. As the days neared, it was very tempting to chicken out of the whole thing, but I didn't. I finally decided, after many years, to take the plunge and get my hair highlighted. See, I'm the epitome of a late bloomer.

The one thing I always liked about myself was my blonde hair. I never wanted it to change. Blonde hair is a bit of an oddity in my family. My mother has brown hair and my dad has black. Both, have brown eyes. Me, on the other hand, I have blonde hair and blue eyes. When I looked at family pictures, I often wondered if I was mixed up at the hospital.

I am convinced that my blonde hair originated from my Swedish roots, pardon the hair pun. My great-grandfather was from Sweden and he had blonde hair and blue eyes. I liked being special; I liked being different.

As the years have rolled by, I've asked my hairdresser countless times if she has seen any gray hairs. Fortunately, the answer has always been “no.” But, I made up my mind a long time ago that I would do whatever I could to keep it.

I'm getting older – things are shifting in places I didn't know they could shift. I have love handles and my crows feet are a little more pronounced on the sides of my face than they used to be. I don't look the same as I did 20 or even 10 years ago. So, as the trend keeps going, I wanted to keep one thing that reminded me of “me” and that was my hair.

So, this was the golden opportunity. It was go big or go home. It was now or never. As I sat in the hairdresser's chair, I felt like a real rebel – a little James Deanish if you know what I mean. I was beyond excited as my hair was being folded into foil. This was a bit bizarre since the only thing I have seen wrapped in foil has been food.

I decided to get my hair highlighted enough that people would notice and to knock off at least five years of my actual age. As my hairdresser took my hair out of the foil, washed and dried my locks, I couldn't believe my eyes. Why didn't I do this years ago? My hair hadn't been this light since high school. I felt like a new me; I felt transformed. I felt like I could take on the world like Mary Tyler Moore and throw my hat up into the air. I felt rejuvenated. I felt alive. For heaven's sake, I felt 34 again. A new hair day had finally dawned and I was going to keep it that way.

You're never too old to try new things. However, I don't think I'll ever color my hair white and put a red streak down the middle to resemble my chickens – just saying.