When I was eight years old, I had my first crush.  The boy, Jacob, sat right in front of me at school.  His hair was the color of radioactive carrots, his skin, white as parchment, and dusted liberally with pale, nearly invisible freckles.  My crush was on his hair, as I don't remember ever actually speaking to him, not even once.  

Jacob's parents owned the bar in our village, which was called a "beer garden."  So, his parents owned the local beer garden. Although my family ate at home to be frugal, on Fridays, everyone in the area went to Jacob's parents' beer garden to pick up fish sandwiches for dinner.  Friday was payday.  The dads would have a beer or two while waiting for the sandwiches.   The moms wouldn't have to cook.   The Catholics had their meat-free meal.  Everybody was happy.  

 Jacob's parents bought the fish fresh at the strip district (not what it sounds like) in Pittsburgh, and made the sandwiches from scratch.  Friday was the only day you could get fresh fish in landlocked Pittsburgh- it came in on ice by train.  I have tried all my life since to find a fish sandwich as good as those were, and I have not yet succeeded.  

I got a good look at Jacob's head all day long for a year.  The Italians consider red hair a curse, because they believe that Judas Iscariot had red hair.  I did not know that at the time.   Luckily, Jacob was only half Italian, like me.  While he did his schoolwork, the boy absentmindedly drew tiny circles on his scalp with his pen.  The blue circles on his white scalp winked incongruously at me through his flaming crew cut every day as I tried in vain to concentrate on my own lessons.  

I did not understand why I could not look away from this hair, which was orange, but was called red.  I had to stop myself, often, from reaching out to touch it.  That would certainly have been extremely uncool in the third grade, where girls and boys were still separate tribes and had mostly no use for each other.  They certainly didn't touch each other in school.

The school year ended, and my hair gazing with it.  But I have been crushing on red heads since then.  

According to an article in Science magazine, called, "Why I have red hair, need to avoid the sun, and shouldn't commit a crime," by Ingrid Wickelgren, the gene that causes red hair has been identified.  MC1R is  a receptor on the surface of skin cells.  When a mutation impacts the receptor, rendering it unable to do its job, then the gene is defective.  If you get defective MC1R genes from both of your parents, then you have a 90% chance that you will have red hair and fair skin.  

So, bring on the mutants, because I LOVE red hair.  

I crushed on many red headed boys and men.  

When I was eleven, Andrew, another red head, carried  my clarinet home from school for me.  And invited me to his birthday party, even though he lived in another town.  But, I guess we were both too awkward to risk getting to know each other better, so we were just friends.    

When I was nineteen, I starteed to dye my dark brown hair red.  It looked fabulous.  But then my hair turned into straw in a few months, despite expensive deep conditioning treatments and wearing a straw hat when I went out in the sun.  I had to have it dyed back to brown and wait for my hair to grow completely out, which took over a year.  My hair does not like being f*%k@d with in any way. 

At twenty, I worked a summer job as a busboy (busgirl?) at a swanky restaurant.  A very tall, cute, red-headed guy worked as a prep cook in the kitchen.  I flirted.  A few weeks after I started, a car pulled up to our house while I was sunbathing outside on the picnic table with baby oil (with iodine in it) all over my body.  One of the boys yelled back at me was my little brother home?  I put my glasses on so I could see, and called to my brother in the house.  I saw my crush guy in the car.  My brother had just turned fifteen that week.  I realized that I was a twenty year old woman crushing on a fifteen year old.  A fifteen year old that was literally more than a foot taller than me.  I felt mortified.  And, although I had relationships with guys five years younger than me when I got older, and it was no big deal -  jail bait is a big deal.  

Two of my boyfriends had blondish red hair - mostly blonde.  They were pretty much my best boyfriends and we are still friends.

I even love other women with red hair - not in the biblical sense - but in the same way that I can't look away from their gorgeous, mutated locks. Franke Potente in Run, Lola, Run, and Milla Jovavitch in The Fifth Element come to mind.   

 I did see Jacob once more, though.  At my 25th high school reunion, it was announced that, in his capacity as a pastor, Jacob would say the blessing before our meal started.  Jacob stood up and delivered a hell-fire-and-brimstone-lake-of-eternal-burning-fire SERMON, shouting and whispering in turn.  None knows the day or the hour!!  He took twenty minutes.  At a high school reunion where just about everybody but him was shit-faced drunk.  It was breathlessly inappropriate and crazy.  Whew!  Dodged a bullet on that one! 

I have heard it said that red hair and light skin, being recessive traits, will eventually disappear in humans.  That grey eyes (the most recessive coloring gene in the human genome) are already gone.  I sure hope not!

This morning I slept in (again), because I stayed up nearly all night reading a fantastic book (again).  I woke up at 10 a.m. when my parents were leaving for church.   I sat around the house in my pjs, reading. 

When my parents got home, they said, "Jacob K. said to say hello to you."  I asked, "Was he at church?" because, I had not ever seen him there before.  "He was the minister," my mom said.  She said everyone at church had mentioned the fish sandwiches to him, after the service.  

"He said, 'Tell Diane to come to church,'" my mom said.    

In my mind's eye I silently shouted:  I worship at the altar of the red-headed mutants!