sjsprWriting

It’s time to dye my hair again. I bought the box at Walgreens last night, but never got around to it.

I´m not a natural redhead. Just wanted to make that clear. In case some of you hadn’t realized.

I’ve got some grey hair under this red, you know. They are popping out more and more up here, and I’ve got a patch back here. One of the greatest fears of aging.

But I don´t dye my hair red because of the grey. More accurately, I dye my hair to costume the challenges I have had in my life.

My grey hair have names.

There’s one up here that’s name is Brandon Mordillo.

2003. I was 28 years old, in my third year of teaching in the New York City public school system in Washington Heights Upper Manhattan. Brandon used to fall asleep in my class. But that was a good thing because in other teacher’s classes he would talk back, yell, sometimes fight back.

From that same school, there’s another one named Ashley. So much potential. Got pregnant at 13 years old and dropped out.

I started dying my hair when I was in high school. I used natural, red henna because I was quite the hippy wannabe, wearing my mom´s bell bottom pants that I had found in some boxes in their closet.

There’s another grey hair up here that is named Dale Mattson. He was my choir teacher. Maybe it wasn’t grey in High School (I wouldn’t know, I was dying it by then) but he pushed me to the maximum. He challenged me to be a better person, to be respectful, to demand respect back, to sing with my heart open but to be careful not to get it stabbed either. 6:45am Jazz Choir Practice as a Junior and Senior in high school was tough. But I learned discipline, and how to read music and how to be proud to be an alto because that’s the hardest, but best, part to sing.

I was dying my hair red at Community College where I took the best literature class I have ever taken… at a Community College. Not a fancy university. And my professor Ellie made us cry because we discovered the beauty of a town called “The Bottom” in Toni Morrison’s book Sula. I think she’s back here behind my ears whispering to me about characters. That class made me realize that I wanted to teach like her.

When I was 23, I cut my hair short and stopped dying it when I moved to Mexico to work at an orphanage in Michoacán. I didn’t know how to speak Spanish. But I quickly learned words like piojo, because when you live in an orphanage, those are the words you learn.

It stayed short when I traveled cross country to learn about my own country before becoming a model of America in another country. I got some grey hairs on that trip: New Year’s Eve 2000 in New York City, when everyone was worried about Y2K, the bus station in downtown Los Angeles (3 times), and climbing the Grand Canyon (one of the most physically difficult things I have ever done).

Paraguay, Peace Corps for 2 years where I learned to speak Spanish with people who don’t even speak Spanish as their first language. I went from talking about piojos and not having the vocabulary for much else, to giving full talleres en español about preventative health. When I wasn’t “working” I was learning language with the mom of the family I lived with, “chismosiando” en el patio while she had her daughters pluck her grey hairs out of her head with tweezers. One by one.

And it was there that I became bilingual ….and realized the beauty of what Paraguayans call “Jopara”, and language experts call code-switching.

And it was shortly after that that I started dying my hair red again.

I taught full time in the public school system while I got my masters. I learned at Teacher’s College in New York that “good teaching is good teaching.” That wasn’t very helpful. What was the best education was stepping into that classroom every day and fighting it out with students like Brandon Mordillo.

My last years in New York, I had a red that was loud, and shocking. My school was staffed with mostly Teach for America teachers who are some of the most amazing people I have ever worked with. We put everything into the creation of a stable, disciplined, academically rigorous environment for a student population that had anything but stability outside our classroom walls. There’s a grey hair named Junior up here. A kid who stopped hanging out on the streets and started hanging out with books.

My grandma was a natural red head. Her nickname was actually ¨Red¨ but it referred to more than just her hair. See, she had a hot temper.

My dad told me once that she got my grandpa into some big trouble at a Company Picnic because she walked straight up to the big boss, (grandpa worked for Union Pacific Railroad) and asked him straight up, Remember this was the way before Civil Rights, she walked straight up to him and said ¨why do you people treat the negros so bad?¨

When grandma got older, her hair faded, but they still called her ¨Red¨

I sometimes wonder if she inspired me to dye my hair red. Or maybe it was my mom.

My grandpa on her side used to tell the story of my mom coming home from Beauty School once with her hair on fire. She was trying out a new color they had received in the shop... “fire engine red”, it was called.

These grey hairs, these red hairs, all of this makes me who I am. And all of them have made me a better person. I’ve faced dissonance, jumped with both feet into the unknown, which is how I ended up here in Puerto Rico and it’s all made me awfully grey, but I’m not ashamed of that.

Yeah, I dye my hair and turn my grey hairs red. But I’ve always done that. It’s not hiding. It’s recognizing the uniqueness in me, and taking all those frustrating students or moments of unhappiness in life, and turning them into something loud and shocking and awesome because that’s the wisdom that comes with experience and age. But it started in high school.

You will all face huge challenges in your life. You will have those Kevins and Doña Estellas and Ismaels that become a part of you even if you don’t want them to. But don’t shut them out. Remember that they are there. Remember that they make you who you are.

So, I dye my hair and continue teaching. They live in my head and are a part of me. But I don´t let them show my weakness. Dying them is a way for me to control what has made me.

This moment right now is only the beginning of your amazing lives. You have so much to learn, and you have so many challenges ahead of you. I have so many more grey hairs that I am more than happy to continue naming. Some of them are up on this stage and you’re totally worth going grey for.