In October 2004, my friend, the artist Maira Kalman, sent me the photographs from a larkish summer driving trip that she, another friend, the writer Akiko Busch, my daughter Kate¹, and I had taken to Lily Dale, New York, the oldest spiritualist community in America. Lily Dale was founded in 1879, and each summer the hundreds of resident psychics and mediums open their candy-colored, slightly down-on-its-heels Victorian town in western New York to the public. The Lily Dale Assembly Web site defines a spiritualist as "one who believes, as the basis of his or her religion, in the continuity of life and in individual responsibility. Some, but not all, Spiritualists are Mediums and/or Healers. Spiritualists endeavor to find the truth in all things and to live their lives in accordance therewith."

Certainly none of our summer group would have listed ourselves as "spiritualists" on an official form. We're really not, in a word, kooks. But we do like to think of ourselves as people groping toward the useful truths, and the chance to spend a long weekend together in rural New York, having our fortunes told, felt like the kind of trip that would be tremendous fun. And boy, were we right. We tried everything available to us in Lily Dale: communed with our fellow travelers in the mornings at the "Stump," a group session deep in the woods; had several individual sessions in psychics' homes; and participated in "healing ceremonies" in "temples."

We even got to mingle with a group of sixteen visiting Tibetan monks who were stopping in Lily Dale as part of a tour sponsored by Richard Gere, but regrettably none of the four of us experienced anything approximating a "visitation," nor were we blown away by any blinding moments of insight from a psychic.

But months later, as I looked through Maira's photographs, one in particular -- of my sixteen-year-old daughter; Aki; and me -- actually changed my life. In that instant, sandwiched between my blond daughter and gray-haired Aki, I saw myself for what I truly was: a forty-nine-year-old mother with a much too darkly shellacked helmet of hair. I clearly was not some faintly with-it older pal of my daughter's, but neither did my hair make me look like a contemporary of Aki's. It was like I was some spectral person floating in a no-man's-land, neither young nor old. I felt as if I didn't know who I really was.

In fact, as I studied the photo, I felt like I was a black hole between gaily dressed Kate and about-to-burst-into-laughter Aki. My uniform of deep, dark mahogany hair and dark clothing sucked all light out of my presence. Seeing that person -- that version of myself -- was like a kick to my solar plexus. In one second, all my years of careful artifice, attempting to preserve what I thought of as a youthful look, were ripped away. All I saw was a kind of confused, schlubby middle-aged woman with hair dyed much too harshly.2

But why this sudden self-critical revelation? In the past, when I'd looked at photographs of myself, I'd always thought I'd looked pretty good. Maybe the portals to greater awareness had been subtly awakened at Lily Dale . . . ? Ummm, no. I think I was just lucky that Maira's photo allowed me the momentary objectivity to see that the dyed-hair forty-nine-year-old wasn't the real me. Kate looked real. Aki looked real. To me, I looked like I was pretending to be someone I wasn't. Someone still young.

I had never before closely considered what the color of my hair communicated to the world. Artificial color was simply what I had always done, what almost everyone my age did, and what I unthinkingly assumed looked good.

But examining that snapshot made me start to think hard about who I was, and who I wanted to be. Would I continue holding on to some dream of youthfulness or could I end the game of denial and move more honestly into middle age?

So maybe the trip to Lily Dale really had, after all, led me to try and "live my life in more accordance with the truth." I had gone on the trip for fun, as an exercise in anthropological tourism, wondering if I might, and rather credulously hoping to, for instance, receive a "message" from my dead parents. Instead of taking a mystical or metaphysical leap into a spiritual unknown, I found that looking at Maira's photograph led me to do something extremely concrete and practical. I came away from that trip with a decision to try to embrace more authenticity and, as a first step along that path, to do something as banal as to quit coloring my hair. To let it be whatever color it was -- nickel? steel? charcoal? platinum? white? who knew? -- beneath the dye. Beyond the inspired lunge toward more everyday personal candor, I was also simply curious about what I actually looked like.

For years, people had commented generously that my relatively unlined skin made me look young. I'm not fat. I don't often wear matronly clothes. You don't look your age, people told me. Naturally, I chose to believe them. And to tell the honest truth, in the self-image I cooked up in my brain, I even one-upped them: in my mind's eye, I imagined I looked thirty-five, not forty-nine. Wrong. I mean, really wrong, but there you are.

Copyright © 2007 by Anne Kreamer

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