Dirty Blonde

I don’t know why I remember, perhaps it’s because I just touched-up my roots with natural medium blonde by Loreal, but when I was around eight or nine I was so envious of my two little sisters with their snowy blonde hair. Mine was just ordinary brown and so was my brother Bobby’s.

They also got a lot of attention during the summer when their bodies got all tanned from head to toe. That blonde white hair was a stand out. Nancy’s was all wavy and worn long past her shoulders, Susan’s was stick straight just like mine, but she had a pixy haircut. Mom always gave me permanents that didn’t last but a couple weeks and then I would just pull it back in a ponytail anyway because I couldn’t figure out how to style it without looking more like a nerd.

I complained plenty to my mom that I hated my hair. She would smooth the loose wispy tendrils back off my face and tell me I had beautiful dishwater blonde hair, not brown. Dishwater blonde? Who wanted dirty water hair anyway? Not me. Later she would refer to it as chestnut. Now I had nuts for hair.

I continued to ask how I got this unwanted color of hair, while Bobby never cared one bit. His was always sheared off in a crew cut which made him lucky because he didn’t have any hair to yank when he provoked me and he did that often by pulling my ponytail whenever he could.

One day I asked my dad about our different hair colors. He explained that my sisters had inherited more of the sweetish coloring, while Bobby and I were more slobs. Huh?

I ran to my mom in tears and told her that dad said Bobby and me were slobs. She stared at me for a few moments and then started laughing so hard she doubled over. Tears streamed down her face. She really could not stop laughing. She tried to speak a couple of times and then would dissolve into giggles.

Dad came in and wanted to know what was so funny. In choppy sentences mom told him I thought he called me a slob. Well, wouldn’t you know it, he roared with laughter, too. I honestly could not figure out why they thought being a slob was so funny.

Eventually things simmered down and it was explained to me that I too was Swedish, but also Slav, which was short for Yugoslavia. We laughed about that for a very long time.

But Bobby made a point of calling me a slob for as long as he could get away with it, and my hair…well, now it’s sweet.