I’ve always loved a man in a fedora, a boy in a baseball cap, a lady in a floppy, big-brimmed hat. My dad was a handsome Mad Man-type in the 1950s and ’60s. He never left the house without wearing a felt fedora to match whatever fine suit or overcoat he had on. There’s something about the way a man wears his fedora that says something about the kind of man he is. I love seeing pictures of the old Yankee Stadium, stands filled to the brim with men dressed up in suits and fedoras with a tiny feather in their hatband.
But that’s all changed now. Everyone, players and fans alike, wears a baseball cap. Which isn’t a bad thing. Almost everybody looks good in a baseball cap. In fact, a young friend of mine says when she sees a man she’s eyeing take off his baseball cap and his appearance loses something in the translation, she and her friends say among themselves, H.O.P. (Hats on, please.) I love baseball. I love baseball players. And I love baseball caps. But I can’t wear one. I have way too much hair. When I put one on I look like Clarabell the clown, if you remember him. Although my hair isn’t red like his, it’s big and curly and sticks out on both sides. The cap just sits way up on top of the thick curls waiting for the wind to take it away.
There are, however, some hats I can wear. In college I would buy a new hat whenever I got depressed. Not like really depressed, depressed. Just one of those moods I liked to indulge in. Play the blues, puff on a cigarette, let myself feel sorry for myself in a way that only a young woman knows how to enjoy. But then when I’d had enough of that, I’d go buy myself some fashionable floppy hat. I had a nice collection. My favorite was a deep blue felt hat with a really wide brim. I wore it way into my hippie-ish days, with jeans and a leather jacket and boots. Very hip. Or sometimes with an elegant princess style dress. I don’t know what happened to that hat. Maybe one of my ex-husbands got it in the divorce.
But I hadn’t worn another since. Until, a few years back, I was walking in Harlem with a boyfriend who bought me a red-brimmed floppy straw hat that we passed on our way downtown. An ambitious young woman had set up shop along 5th Avenue and all her hats were attached to the chain-link fence behind her little card table. There were church-lady hats, and Easter bonnets–Oh! I had one of those once, too! White straw with a navy ribbon streaming behind it! My daddy bought it for me!–and there were cloches and there was my red straw hat. When I put it on, one of the men who was hanging around the hat lady grabbed my iphone and said, “I’m taking your picture in that! You need that! It’s good!” When I saw the picture, I decided he was right. I had to have the hat. So my boyfriend bought it for me for $5.00. No kidding! I wore it the rest of the way down 5th Avenue and every time I caught my reflection in a window, it made me smile. Sadly, it didn’t save the romance. But a few years later after we’d broken up, I wore it to a coffee date with another man I’d met online. He recognized me by my hat because I’d posted a picture of me wearing it. We’ll see if this hat brings me better luck this time! Hard to say, since he doesn’t wear a fedora.
