I am not the Imelda Marcos of hats, gentle reader, but I have accumulated some in my time, and, at Nogglestead, they (and those owned by the other members of the family) tend to gather in two places.
One, the top of the video game in my office, is where my hats end up.
This is where I put hats which I do not wear often. A lot of times, these include hats I’ve bought on vacations to cover my balding head.
The collection includes:
- A cheesehead.
- The boonie hat I just bought in Florida last month.
- The paper hat I bought in Arkansas in 2023.
- Three (3) grey fedoras that I have bought at garage sales over the years before re-learning that grey is not really my color. One of these might actually be the first fedora I got while in college, which I wore when writing my first novel.
- Two (2) black fedoras that were my daily wear fedoras before they wore out–one has a hole at the top of the crown at the front, where you grab a hat to take it off. The other does not seem to hold its shape.
- Another straw hat with the Island Beach brand name on it, which probably indicates I also bought it in Florida.
- A little Tyrolean (Alpine) hat which I bought at Friestatt’s Ernte Fest a couple years ago (maybe 4 now?).
- Three (3) NRA caps which I got for renewing my memberships over the years.
- A John Deere cap which probably came with my lawnmower–I cannot imagine actually buying one. Oh, I see the back says Owner’s Edition, so, yeah, I got that sixteen years ago when I bought the
- A Canada cap which my mother-in-law bought for me as a souvenir on one of her driving trips probably fifteen years ago. Or twenty. They’re about the same when you reach a certain age.
- A youth-sized Green Bay Packers cap.
- A white Springfield Cardinals cap which I bought as part of a bundle at a silent auction or at the ballpark.
- A Springfield Cardinals 2012 champs cap (ibid.).
- A Milwaukee Brewers cap which I bought on one of the trips to the Dells–probably 2017. It was the go-to cap for a while, but it has gotten stained, so it’s in the… collection, I guess?
- A St. Louis Blues hat which I bought back when we were DINKs who went to a lot of Blues games.
- A Missouri State ball cap which I bought to wear to…. The one football game we went to a decade or so back? Or one of the two Ice Bears games we went to over the years (and widely spaced, which is unfortunate since the tickets are inexpensive).
- A SparkCon hat I got as swag at the Walmart Cybersecurity Conference the first time I went. Pretty sure it was not this year.
- The Confederate hat I got after my father died.
Jeez, Louise, that’s 24 hats. More than I expected when I started writing this post. They were not only atop the game but behind it, as the top of the video game was a frequent destination for the kittens (and the cats still hop up there from time to time). The hats need blocking, and they’re all covered with dust and cat hair. To be honest, if I’d written this post last week, many of them would have ended up in the Lutherans for Life rummage sale. Like the probably youth-sized bucket hat I’d hoped to take to Florida (but it was youth-sized, probably not shrunken via washing as I said earlier).
Atop the refrigerator, hats also accumulate.
This is where I put the hats I wear regularly, including:
- My current black fedora.
- The current paper hat, if any–currently, it’s the ladies resort hat I bought last month in Florida.
- The Big Cedar Lodge cap I bought at our aborted vacation last year where it kept the rain off more than the sun.
The rest of the family keeps their caps up there as well. These include:
- A Missouri State Pride Band cap that my beautiful wife got at one of their reunions.
- A Dennis Hanks Chevrolet hat. That was my mother-in-law’s car dealer. Not sure if it came with the Chevy when she downsized or if she gave it to one of the boys at some time or another.
- Two (2) tech company swag hats from conferences.
- Two (2) tech company swag hats from my oldest son’s current employer, brought back from his time behind the booth in Florida last month.
- A SparkCon cap with less cat fur on it than mine.
- A tech company swag cap which is for my wife’s company. Not sure how many of those she got or if it was a free sample when she ordered other swag.
Ah, gentle reader. As with book accumulation points, sometimes hat accumulation points get decommissioned. Not depicted in this post: The pile of hats which had been in the garage.
For a long time, I had a pile of hats on the little desk in the garage which included:
- The hat I wore to the range in 2008–what was that company’s name? Something-care–I know TimBob, Jack Straw’s friend and who visited this blog in those early days, where “early” means five years into it.
- A Netscape hat whose logo was off-center.
- The cap I got when visiting the bay area and which served as my painting cap for a multi-year turn around the fence.
- A Queen City Roofing Materials cap which I bought when we first moved here. I guess I wanted to be more locally authentic or something.
- Several (?) other straw or brush hats that I’d bought on various vacations and intended for gardening use.
- A Dogwood Canyon cap bought on one of our trips to Big Cedar or Branson where we went further south for an expensive walk.
And probably a couple of others I forget.
As part of the multi-year garage cleaning project, I gathered them and boxed them for a donation–and they remained in a box or two awaiting an opportunity to donate them (which was this Monday, as I mentioned). I did wear some of the straw hats while gardening from time-to-time, but got into the habit of just putting on my most-recently-too-stained-for-going-out cap since the noise-canceling-but-music-blasting headset can fit over a ball cap but not a fully brimmed hat. My current cap is my previous Big Cedar Lodge cap. The garage might also have another cap stashed somewhere for the other lawnmower riders to use, but most of those aforementioned caps are in the Trinity Lutheran gym (or are in a dumpster nearby).
My goodness, that is a lot of hats. And an awful lot of words about the hats. But most of them are personal relics now, pointers to past events to cue my memories.
