A Story About A Hat

     When I was a kid, one of my favorite people on the planet was my great grandmother. We just called her Ma, and with the Jersey accent, it sounded like Mar to me, so that’s what I called her. She was a tough old broad, born in the late 1800’s, but she was also very caring and loving and nurturing. I have a million stories about her, some funny, some bittersweet, and most of them heartwarming, but I’ll save those for another time. All you need to know is that she helped raise me as well as my brother, and I learned a lot about family, trust, and self respect from her.
     This is a story about a hat.
     My great grandmother Mar bought the hat you see pictured here off a clearance table at a department store before I was even born. She got it for my brother, and he wore it for a few years, but to him it was just another hat. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, that’s the attitude you take with most of the clothes you own throughout your life. They are just shoes or pants or a winter hat.
     Except sometimes when you’re a kid. I think most little kids get attached to certain articles of clothing. It’s probably a security thing, like Linus’ blanket from Peanuts. Most kids can’t get away with dragging a blanket with them everywhere they go, so they instill some hat or shirt or backpack with magic properties to act as their armor to the world. Often, it is something with a picture or logo of whatever is culturally popular at the time. When I was young, it was either some Saturday morning cartoon character, or Evel Kneivel or the Fonz. Whatever it was, most kids had some trademark piece of clothing they wore everywhere.
     When my brother’s white hat got passed down to me, it became my favorite piece of clothing. It was nothing special, just a plain white hat. In fact, I probably started wearing it before I was dressing myself, or even aware that I had a hat on my head at all. As I came into self awareness, the hat just seemed to always be there. The fact that my great grandmother bought it meant a lot to me as well, even as a very young child.
     I was not the most secure kid in the world. I have detailed all the bullying and crap I had to deal with from the age of five, and I was afraid of the world in a lot of ways, especially when it involved other kids. The first day of kindergarten, they had to pry my hands off of the street sign in front of the school, and drag me kicking and screaming into class. I haven’t really gotten any better at going to new places and doing new things. I don’t cry as much, but I still have a lot of apprehension and anxiety.
     So my hat became my security blanket. I wore it every chance I got, and if it was too warm for a hat, I would sometimes just carry it around with me. At school, I would never leave it in the coat closet, I would keep it in my desk just to have it near. I would sometimes sit and compulsively fold it; in half, then in quarters, then smooth it out flat again. I would panic if I thought I had dropped it or left it behind somewhere, but I managed to hang onto it throughout my childhood.
     The weird thing is, the hat didn’t really help my image at all. In fact, it was bright white, and stood out in a gaggle of kids. My parents could always spot me in a crowd, or from a block away. That might have been part of what made me feel more secure as well.
     So what ended up happening was that I wore a little kid sized hat long after I shouldn’t have. You usually wear a winter hat with the edge turned up and doubled back on itself, but as I got older, there wasn’t really as much material to enable me to do that. Winter hats usually had a little extra space, and a little bit of a peak on them, mine was stretched tight as can be, barely covering my ears. I was now entering high school and still wearing a bright white hat that was meant for a pre adolescent.
     I didn’t care, though. It was all I had from my former life in New Jersey. It had gone with me to Texas, and now back to Pennsylvania. It kind of became my trademark, and in that weird way that someone who is acting or dressing strangely and different when you’re a kid, you weren’t sure if you should mock me or think I was cool. For years, I kind of fell in the middle. I was picked on anyway, so the hat didn’t really matter one way or the other, and for other people, it became part of my identity.
     Then one day, some kid came up with the idea that I looked like a sperm in my white hat. Yes, I know that doesn’t really make much sense, but it didn’t have to. The die was cast. From then on, a bunch of people would refer to it as the sperm hat, and there is no way to make that cool at all. I tried to ride it out and hoped it would pass, but it didn’t. So one day in my mid teens, I finally took off the hat that my great grandmother bought all those years ago, the hat that was a part of me before I was even really me, and I put it in my dresser drawer and forgot about it.
     And as far as I knew, the sperm hat was long gone. I had last seen it about 40 years ago, and figured it had been donated or thrown out decades earlier.
     My parents have been preparing for a garage sale the last couple of weeks, so when my mother said “look what I found when I was going through some old boxes” and tossed it in my lap the other day, it took me completely by surprise. I got such a genuine thrill and nostalgic ache the moment I saw my small white hat from all those years ago.
     I’m not a sentimental guy about material things. My grandmother was a hoarder, and my mother tends to get way too attached to a lot of things, which is probably why she still had the hat in the first place. I know this, so about 15 years ago, when I noticed that I was starting to accumulate a lot of things I never used or even looked at, I made it a point to get rid of it all. I am constantly reevaluating things that have little emotional attachment to me or that I get any use out of, and moving it out the door.
     Still, when I saw that hat, so many memories came flooding back that it kind of staggered me. I was so happy to see that old stupid hat again, so much that it shocked the hell out of me just how much I cared. I thought about my family, my great grandmother, how that hat was present during so many of the incidents and daily life that formed who I was. It took me right back to all of it, good and bad, and I realized how much that hat was still a part of me, and always will be.
     So I still am not going to hoard a bunch of old crap, and get sentimental over material things. There was a lot of other stuff from my youth that I came across while going through stuff for the garage sale, and almost none of it meant anything to me. Maybe a fleeting fond memory, then I tossed it in the trash. I don’t get attached to material things, and that isn’t going to change.
     Except my hat. I am never letting it go again. I will always have it tucked away somewhere safe, and hopefully someday when I am very old, I will sit in my rocking chair and hold it, and think back on my family, my friends, and all the things I did in my youth while wearing my small white hat that my great grandmother bought from a clearance table.
     I might cry, I might smile, but I know that I will be content, and probably feel a little safer, with my old friend from the beginning still there close to me at the very end. Who could ask for more than that?