Bad Hair Color and Smoked Chickadees

Part One

The other night, I went to see mythologist Michael Meade give a talk, wherein he said that the job of every caring person is to go out and get into the “right kind of trouble.”

This made me think of bad hair color and smoked chickadees.

I was in church full of Vashon Island hippies, the bearded and the flowy. Maybe that’s why I had hair on my mind. Even though I’m pretty sure this wasn’t what Meade had in mind, I couldn’t help but think of the night I said to myself the words no woman should ever say:

“I’m not too drunk to color my own hair.”

I had been on the way to Safeway, to buy a box of hair color. I had been stalking that box for weeks. I wanted a dark, but distinctly red brown. I was sick of my light brown highlighted hair. I wanted it to be just the slightest bit edgy, you know, but still tolerable at work the next morning at my big presentation. Somehow be the up-and-coming PR girl who seems like she has a secret life as a punk rock jazz singer. As I turned the corner to walk up to Safeway, my friend Ward pulled up to the stoplight in his battered, scary-looking, robin’s egg blue van and said, “Hey, gorgeous. Whatcha doin’?” And I said “Having a pint with you.” And hopped in.

Well. One pint turned into three. But it was the height of summer. When he dropped me off that night, it was still light outside and I always find it hard to believe I’m drunk when there’s still daylight. So I said those fated words, bought my box of cherry cola hair color and went home to pour chemicals on my scalp.

When I woke up the next morning, Monday morning, I hoped it wasn’t as bad as I remembered, but really, it was worse. I had a halo of hot pink, saturating the roots of my hair from my scalp to out about two inches. Then the pink continued in splotches, long streaks and stripes that smeared through the rest of my hair. I looked like a flamingo that had gotten stuck in a superfund site. I decided to fake it. “A French twist,” I said to myself “can fix anything.”

I got five seconds into what was supposed to be my big moment at the firm. My description of my first big press conference: coverage in the Times, the P-I, the Daily Journal of Commerce. I’m talking above the fold. It was a room full of press whores and not one of those jerks was listening. They were staring, a little slack-jawed. I think they were waiting for me to explain. Then Tim, the labor union guy, raised his hand. “Yes, Tim?” I said. “What the hell happened to your hair?” he said.

But, I don’t think that this is the “right kind of trouble” Meade was talking about. I mean, I believe in playing a part. I believe in Halloween everyday as a proactive approach to creating the story of your life. I do in my better times. But, in my worse times, when the plug has fallen out of the wall and I don’t feel the current any more, when that happens, I do shit even stupider than saying those fateful, flamingo-hair-producing words at 8 o’clock a summer night. When I’m out of the rush and I can’t feel it anymore, I start multi-tasking and not paying attention and living too fast.

I start smoking chickadees.

I put the nest box up four years ago. It’s on the north side of a fence post, above the gate into the backyard. My book said it should be at least six feet off the ground, in partial sun. It’s basically a honeymoon timeshare for chickadees without the scam meeting: a box about 10” tall, maybe 4” wide and 5” deep. A round entry hole just larger than a quarter. You hang it up and it gives the chickadees a substitute for their ordinary habitat: a hole in a standing dead tree. I can see the box from my kitchen window. Looked down on it for two years. Nothing. February and March came and went without a single shopper. And then it happened. They started checking it out. Landed on the little roof. Started going in, coming back out again. Checking it out from all vantage points. Is this a safe place to raise my kids? I bet it never occurred to them to worry about the cement pad just inside the gate. Not until July. Barbecue season.

We were past nest-building by then. No more sticks and grass, no more flying a spring relay-race of homemaking. We were past the brooding phase, where one parent is on the nest at all times and the other is flying to the supermarket to buy ice cream and pickles, or, if she was anything like me, lemons and raw pineapple. Now, it was feeding time. There was at least one chick in there. Every time a parent left the screaming started: chirp!chirp!chirp!chirp!chirp! They both ran ragged, beaks full of bugs. I watched from my window. Greedy for all signs. I’d pinned my hopes to those chickadees. I’d left my PR job far behind, as disillusioned with environmental politics as I was with home hair color, but no less concerned about the future. Like a woman trying to get over a bad buzz cut, I retreated while things grew out. I stayed home, became a mother and tried to make up for not being politically active for mother nature by helping nature be a mother in my own garden. A nest box. Finally occupied! Hope in my own backyard. My own backyard, where, overtasking, strung out, sleepless me grilled two steaks on the barbie on the cement pad. The plume of smoke rose like a hot pink chemical flume, killing every bird in the nest.