All This Blue Food

Baskin and Robbins are here.  They need at least twenty-four hours to prepare an ice cream birthday cake.  My wife ordered it.  I’m not sure which flavor has all this blue food coloring within, or if this is what was used to write her name, but this cake melted iridescent.  We have a budding blue lake forming, after cutting pieces that seems to stain our lips and our clothes and the very tabletop. 

This color is appropriate to consider on my daughter’s birthday as she is very keen to die her hair blue.  My wife and I seem to have collectively given up on nay saying this idea with the assumption of her twelfth birthday.   I’d teased her and acted shocked and generally behaved in an obstructionist fashion the last six times or so it has come up.  What for?  I eventually reasoned with myself.

Certainly I was purposefully not cutting and then aggressively buzzing my hair around that time.  I’m certain I never died it though.  That always seemed a bit achingly vain rather than counter cultural to my self-image consultation logic.  She sent me a picture of a lady with a wing like streak of metallic blue in her otherwise black hair.  “I want that.  Is it OK?”  I pondered for a bit before answering the chat, and reminded myself that I wasn’t going to throw up a roadblock any more.  “Sure.  Go for it.”

She was determined to go today.  And at the same time she was intimidated by what she was about to do.  I resisted mightily the urge to say a mistake would be costly, requiring months to grow out.  And indeed, she convinced herself and headed off determined.  But she came home a few minutes later deflated because it was going to take two hours and she needed to be at dance class in ninety minutes time.  “Just visit them when you return home from dance.”   This is the latest.  I’ll know by dinner whether or not she got the blues.