I think it is useful to occasionally take stock of your possessions, category by category. Today, the category is hats.
Hats (or my hats, at least) are easily collected and rarely worn.
I have far too many winter beanies. All of them have something wrong with them: not warm enough, too scratchy, or not large enough. I have exactly one beanie that possesses none of these faults; alas, it is bright hunter’s orange, rendering it somewhat absurd anywhere besides its native habitat.
I also have a fedora—an exact copy of Indiana Jones’ version, gifted to me by my grandfather, who firmly believes the modern renunciation of hats was a massive mistake and equally firmly believes that taller men can wear wider brims. Despite its incongruity with the rest of my life, it is a sturdy piece of wool. I wear it roughly twice a year, when I have the occasion to be out in foul weather without the aid of an umbrella. There exists a picture of me with snow shovel in hand and a half inch of snow collected on the brim of my headgear. It has a certain charm to it.
My other single-purpose hat is floppy wide-brimmed nylon vaguely sporty hat. I believe it was marketed to hikers, but since I am an outdoorsman only when forced to be, I use it for when I’m doing yardwork in the summer. I undoubtedly look ridiculous, but I need to keep the sun off the back of my neck.
Finally, there’s the collection of baseball caps. I have both played baseball and attended a number of baseball games throughout my life. It’s like walking through cockleburs—like it or not, the caps are coming home with you.
When I was 20 years old, I went on a work trip to Australia (along with two similarly-aged peers). The nature of the trip meant I did not see much of the local sites, instead spending the majority of my time sitting on a hill in the outback with a number of other folks. My peers and I were the juniormost of the bunch and thus not trusted with anything vaguely important. I battled boredom by cataloging the quantity and diameter of the spiders we shared the hilltop with. One of my pictures shows a spider happily perched on its spiderweb, with my hand behind it for scale—it was roughly the same size as my hand, which I’m told is unimpressive for Australia. The next picture in my reel (timestamped roughly ten minutes later), shows one of our senior colleagues with the same spider bivouacking on his hat—the bipedal of the pair having rudely walked straight through the octopedal’s unfortunately-positioned web.
My junior colleagues and I had our flights booked separately than the rest, so we left the group (arachnids and hominids alike) one night to go back to town, leaving the country the next morning. We were met by another member of management, who had clearly been directed to make sure we made it to our flights. I don’t know what emotion prompted him in that moment (my guess is pity), but when he picked us up at roughly 7:00pm, he dropped us downtown and said “call me at midnight or whenever you want to be picked up, whichever comes first.”
Not being terribly imaginative, we settled on a bar crawl as our activity of choice—might as well take advantage of the drinking age down under while we’re there. This option still posed some difficulties—namely, a lack of liquidity. I was the most hard off—I had lost my wallet on an earlier leg of the trip, so I had withdrawn petty cash from my account before entering Australia, but had no other means of paying for goods and services. My coconspirators generously promised to cover me one drink each, which brought my purchasing power up to three drinks. Nonetheless, we persevered.
Our bar crawl quickly became a bar campout. It turns out if you tell a group of drunk Australians that its your final night in Australia and you haven’t had any time to enjoy the town, they will buy all your drinks for you. Hospitable bunch, the Aussies.
One of our gracious hosts was a former professional athlete—rugby or Australian rules football, I can’t recall—with the pictures to prove it. As it so often happens, his career was cut short by injury, but he landed on his feet with a thriving real estate business. Or perhaps it was a car dealership. Maybe a sports merchandising company? Regardless, the logo was on his hat.
At some point, I got up to go to the bathroom and came back to an empty beer-covered table with the aforementioned hat sitting all by its lonesome. I snagged the hat and asked the bartender what happened—it seems the Aussies had decided to crawl over to the next bar and it was time for us to turn back into our proverbial pumpkins. I tried to leave the hat with the bartender, but he commented that he didn’t think that its owner would want it back. I shrugged, stuck it in my back pocket, and wandered outside to find my counterparts. They had already called our designated driver, who showed remarkable patience ferrying three rather drunk and chatty back to their hotel. Hungover the next morning, I hastily packed for my flight, and when I landed back in the States, I discovered why the athlete/real estate agent/car salesman/sports agent had left his cap; it had been used to soak up the beer, and it smelled as you’d expect—as did the rest of my clothes.
I still can’t remember what the logo means, but the hat at least smells a little better now.
I also have a signed, game-worn cap from the local team, gifted to me by a well-meaning family member. That’s cool too I guess.