Age Limits

At age sixteen, a kid gets a driver's license and goes a little wild.  At age twenty-one, legal drinking...woohoo!  There must be an age when female facial hair comes of age and takes on a life of its own.  Boys peer in the mirror, hoping to find a mere shadow of a beard, that sign of masculine maturity, that coming of age.  As a woman of "a certain age," I also peer in the mirror (increasingly magnified) to catch sight of an errant hair.  Eyebrows, once short, neat and tidy, grow to alarming lengths and poke out like antennae if not watched carefully and tamed.  Chin hairs are downright evil.  No matter how carefully I scan the face before an event, plucking every emerging offender, there is always one hair lurking that I won't find until afterward.  That one hair is accompanied by its own individual spotlight so that everyone else could see it, I'm sure.  There is a friend, even older than I, whose solution (and eyesight) required periodic shaving.  One approached her for a kiss on greeting with the same hesitation one would kiss a porcupine, with much the same result.  Curly hair on a toddler is a mass of ringlets.  When curly hair reaches that ill-defined age limit, it breaks free of the symmetrical spirals of youth and takes on more kinks and curves than Lombard Street in San Francisco.  Got a wild hair?  I've got a head full!

It's time to take the trash down to the big road.  I'd better brush my hair.