The New Yorker:

Being an older father, just like my dad.

By Jelani Cobb

Forty-nine years ago, on what I recall as a Saturday morning when I was six and my father was fifty-six, I barged into the bathroom, as was my habit, and witnessed a scene that both bewildered and fascinated me. Our nineteen-seventies-era yellow-orange sink was covered in thick black streaks, as were parts of the countertop. My father, a formidable man who had been a heavyweight boxer in his youth and retained his imposing physique well into his sixties, hulked over the faucet. He turned to me, and I saw that his mustache and upper lip were stained the same color as the countertop, as was a portion of his normally salt-and-pepper hair. To his right was what appeared to be a cup of ink, and he periodically dipped a comb into it and gingerly pulled it through his hair. I was already, at that age, an expert eavesdropper, and an enigmatic sliver of conversation that I’d overheard a few days earlier began to make sense. My mother, whose preoccupations included Telly Savalas, an icon of seventies television who’d shown that baldness, and therefore middle age, could be a selling point in the right man, had said to my father, “You should keep your gray. It looks good on you.” I had never seen my father’s hair any other color but gray, so it had not occurred to me that there were options. The scene playing out in the bathroom was clarifying. The ritual completed, my father assessed himself in the mirror. The still-wet strands glistened as if he’d just stepped out of an ad for Afro Sheen. The dyes of that era were not like the subtle modern versions. They were blunt instruments wielded against the most obvious sign of aging. The concoction in the cup had made my father’s hair unnaturally, propagandistically black. His camouflage stood out. He did not look like a man with dark hair; he looked like a man with gray hair who had dyed it black. I decided that I agreed with my mother. “I like the gray better,” I told him. “Yeah?” he said. “Wait until you get some.” Then he chuckled, knowingly.

I replayed that conversation years later, when I was twenty-nine, and a single recalcitrant gray hair showed up in my beard. I replayed it again in my early thirties, when a colony of them formed a streak on my chin, and again in my forties, when a friend described me as having a “salt-and-pepper beard.” The sight of it each morning increasingly reminded me of a data visualization of a gentrifying neighborhood. I thought about the dye incident most recently a few weeks ago, when August, the elder of my twin sons, by nine minutes, bounded into my lap and insouciantly asked why my beard was so gray. He is five, and I’m fifty-five. My hair is gray because I’m trying to win an argument with your long-deceased grandfather, I thought. His twin brother, Hollis, who is earnest to a fault, is consumed with simpler questions: “Daddy, are you stronger than a bear? Can you pick up a whole car? What about a house?” He awaits the answers as if trying to understand what station in the Marvel Universe I should occupy. Before I could start talking to August about hair follicles that gradually lose their ability to produce melanin, he answered his own question. “I know why. It’s because of age.” Yeah, I thought, just wait until you get some, and laughed at my own cleverness. A therapist friend once told me that people frequently strive to become their parents or their unparents, using them as role models to be emulated or as a negative road map of what is to be avoided, or sometimes both, simultaneously. I contrasted my father’s approach to aging by allowing time to mark its passage as it sees fit, but I echoed him in a much more profound way—by having young children at a point when that passage had already become apparent.

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