Every cool job has a hat. Astronauts, firefighters, high paid prostitutes, these are all professions requiring complicated headgear. As children we dream of finding the perfect chapeau. We fill our days and nights trying on the cranial haberdash of our parents and peers. We grow up and begin to see that we are more than the contents of our hair bucket. We are in fact a body of work to be considered. Why then the ubiquitous nature of the baseball cap? Where now the fedora, boater and beanie of better days? Is the ghost of the millinery as dead as the dreams we once wore under his brim.
When I was little I was told the hat I wore defined me. I was a Construction worker because I wore a hardhat. I was a soldier because I wore a helmet. I was funny because I wore my Mother's Easter bonnet all summer. I had a beanie with a propeller, not because I dreamt of flight, but mostly because I kept trying to talk the neighbour kid into jumping from his roof. The cowl of our formative years shaped our play and helped us interpret our desires. To this very day I have a deerstalker hanging from my wall. A reminder of my love for Sherlock Holmes and that with the right hat, you can cause a girl to lose interest almost instantly. Only by donning varied and decidedly different hats in my youth, could I realise now, how hard it is to find a hat that doesn't make my other body parts look small.
The baseball cap represents many things, catching, pitching, getting to hit things with a bat, but the most poignant of all these is how it represents youth and promised dreams. A pro-ball player stands among team mates, carrying on his shoulders distant ideals and fantasies. The baseball player starts as rookie and blossoms until he is sidelined, traded, or forced to open a theme restaurant. Each slide is a stirring of the dirt of our desires. Each pickle and balk is a dance with failure and success. Each stolen base is a chance at getting home and having sex with a woman who likes athletes. The baseball cap embodies our defeats and victories, easily replaced yet always intrinsic to our existence.
It used to be you could tell a Man or Lady of distinction by their tam or stove pipe. If you could afford to wear something dead on your noggin you were head and shoulders above others. Ann Boleyn might have lived longer if she had sought more than a crown. Perhaps the theatre patrons would have helped Abe Lincoln if he hadn't worn a hat that blocked the view of others. Marie Antoinette sporting wig of Twinkies and Ho-Ho's could not have fared any worse. It would seem the fancier the lid, the worse the things you did.
I have a wall covered in hats. Some I wear daily, while others I gaze upon as a reminder of jobs undone and unwanted. Mostly I know, whatever mantle I choose, the heart fires of my own pleasure will provide the warming love that covers me at both ends.
DaBuoy
