“Do you want to come to Pans with me for lunch?” I ask my daughter, Jilly, knowing fully well that she will refuse. Pans is a pretty basic beanery. A meat and spuds kinda place. It is unadorned with frills of any kind. I like it because the food is inexpensive, good, and plentiful. Jilly hates Pans for exactly the same reasons I like it, but there is another reason she doesn’t want to be seen with me in public.“Dad, do you plan to wear that stupid hat?” she asks, already rolling her eyes at the anticipated answer.
“Natch,” I confess. “My hat is the first thing I put on in the morning and the last thing I take off at night. Unless I’m indoors, eating, or in an elevator. My dad taught me to always take my hat off in an elevator. It’s kinds old fashioned I know, but…”
“Dad?”
“What?”
“Dad, face it, you aren’t a cowboy. Besides, you look like a walking lawn umbrella when you wear that stupid hat. It’s embarrassing.”
Jilly doesn’t understand that my hat is a lot more than a mere head covering. Just because I haven’t sunk spur and rode rough shod over the stubble fields lately doesn’t mean I’m not a cowboy. Being a cowboy has as much to do with attitude as it does with pedigree, although I have a smidgen of that too. My Cowography is in tact even if Jilly doesn’t know much about it and merely feigns interest when I try to tell her. She’s still young. I know developing an interest in things as boring as family history takes time.
Hats are a very personal thing and it seems to me that the world is make up of two kinds of people: them what wears hats and them what don’t.
I come from a long line of hat people. Both my granddad and my dad wore a Stetson all their lives. I suppose my hat attraction began with wanting to be like them. After a while the hat habit was impossible to break. I don’t feel dressed if I leave the house without wearing a hat. For a long time I wore a baseball cap usually with a logo that read CATor KENWORTH…(no redneck, I) In the last few years I have gravitated back to wearing a felt hat during the winter and a straw hat in summer.
I bought my last hat partly because my wife Beth didn’t like it. I was grazing on the Internet one day when I found a picture of a hat that appealed to me. It was shaped in the old style dating back to the 1880’s with a high pinch crown and a wide brim.
“Whadda ya think of this hat?” I asked her. She bent over my shoulder and peered at the monitor. “Ewwww,” she said, tracing the crease in the crown with her finger.
I would have described the hat in a lot of ways but “Ewwww” would never have occurred to me.
“That crease is called a Montana Peak," I told her. "In the olden days you could tell where a guy came from by the crease in his hat. There‘s even a Canadian Crease but I never cared much for that style.” Then thanks to computer imaging I can turn the hat around so we can see what it looks like from different angles.. “Look! It even has a mule kick in the back.”
Beth is unimpressed. “Well, you’re the guy who has to wear it, not me.”
"How 'bout if I order two?" I ask her. "His and hers models?"
"As if!" Beth says as she walks away.
So, I ordered it and it arrived from Colorado about two month later. I’ve had a lot of comments from my friends, good and bad, and I’ve garnered a lot of laughs from that hat. It doesn’t bother me one bit what anyone else thinks about my preference in head gear. I simply don’t care.
