Stephen Colbert, as his TV persona, likes to say that he sees no color; he’s colorblind on race issues. He likes to say it as a precursor to saying something that comes from a position of white, male privilege or when speaking with someone who studies, politics around or otherwise identifies around race lines. Preferably both.

With all necessary caveats about my own white privilege, liberal white guilt, political awareness and unawareness, I’m a bit like Stephen Colbert. Without the suit or success. I suspect it’s because at the end of the day, I’m hopelessly reductionist. For me, all people reduce to families, a thing which I have passing familiarity.

I finally got my hair cut yesterday. It’s been a long time in coming, but I discovered the place down the street can be booked by email. I love doing shit like booking an appointment without actually having real, human contact. Then I don’t have to feign interest in something on the telephone.

In truth, I’m a fickle, whorish hair care customer. I’ll walk in anywhere and demand immediate service and keep walking until I get a taker. Sometimes I go back, sometimes I look for another quick and easy hookup. Sometimes I let myself go, unkempt and uncaring.

However, Shirin down the street trims my bangs for free. Better yet, she’s not annoyingly banal in her haircutting chatter, like many the bubblegum rock listening salonistas wielding scissors. She’s either quiet or interesting and funny. In fact, the salon in general isn’t all about blasting pop music I hate or incessant blathering.

Somewhere in talking about her holiday weekend in Seattle and seeing family, my remembrances of July 4ths spent in Boston, history in Europe versus U.S. Colonial history versus California’s lack of extensive, long-term history, as well as my hair and what I wanted done with it, while she layered tin foil and coloring chemicals onto my tresses, I mentioned that my long hair is a reaction to Pat’s unfortunate hair loss. For reasons unknown, Pat passed from this dimension with near as anyone could tell, a smooth cue ball dome.

When Pat started buying hats to hide the falling hair, I started growing mine out with a vengeance. If I suffer hair loss at 70, I’ll remember at 40 I was rocking rock-star locks.

After I mentioned my mother and her unfortunate, inexplicably early for her family, death, I found out Shirin’s mom had just died about a month ago at the age of 90. Shirin’s probably in her 50s, has at least one son and lives around here (obviously). As it turns out, she is also the youngest of a family of six (one more than my own) and her dad died when she was little, so her mom raised the family on her own.

Shirin’s mom, before the Alzheimer’s set in, was apparently sharp-tongued and sarcastic. Her youngest daughter was the one who would talk and joke back, challenging her, and ended up doing a lot of the routine care taking in the end. She had a running gag with her mother in better days that she was so opinionated and bossy with her kids, she would come back as a mosquito to continue to annoy them into the next life.

Familiar, no?

We swapped stories about the different reactions and the different family politics, birth order, family skirmishes and how huge losing your mother is in the scale of life’s losses. I think I made her feel better about some of the inevitable arguments and bad feelings. Pretty much down the line of siblings and ourselves, we had parallel stories, including some terrible conversations that left us feeling that either we were losing our minds or someone else was acting dead-on crazy.

I told her our family’s lawyer said we were surprisingly non-contentious, even with the contentiousness that was. She said that hearing about other people fighting was good, because maybe she was just normal.

Yup. I assured her. And we laughed a lot. And somewhere, as we compared notes and laughed, we figured out a Persian widow with six kids, who ended up going from Iran to London to California, and a Catholic(ish), Boston Irish widow with five kids, who never really left Massachusetts, were kind of the same. And those 11 children are kind of the same, too.

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