THE VIRTUE OF HATS!

I spent my early youth living less that one mile from a city that had a Major League Baseball team. If you qualify the D.C. team as having been “major league” caliber then you didn’t spend much time at the ballpark. Some of the grade school teams performed more consistently. While having close proximity to a team can be considered a boon it can also at times prove debilitating. Take for example the typical spasm on opening day when it seems every employee in most offices call in sick with some mysterious 24 hour flu. It happens every April! The traffic that day on rush hour routes is miraculously light. The lines around the ballpark however are longer than the rooster line waiting to get into the henhouse at laying time. It certainly is good training that helps later in your work life with the special hijinks required to sneak away from the office when the 7-11 chili and cheese hot dog calls your name in the middle of the afternoon.

Having a home team added quite a bit of spice to my young impressionable life. I can remember sitting in the stands with my Washington Senators baseball cap on my head. I can almost picture it. A box of pop corn on my lap, a cold soda nearby, with peanuts and the ballpark hot dogs provide quite a bit of fond memories. You’d have thought I just went there to eat! If you knew what the folks fed us four nights a week you’d realize the ballpark served fine cuisine. I could get a baseball program with pages to score the game with each players name and how they batted each time they were up. It was magical I tell you, especially the part about throwing money at a guy a half an aisle away to have food tossed back at you. You’ve never lived until a large peanut bag beans your noggin creating a knot on your forehead. You certainly stood a better chance of catching the nuts than a fly ball on any given day.

Then my team took off to the Southwest and left me with a kid size baseball cap to fit around an ever enlarging crown. The peanut knots and welts had receded by then. It didn’t help that my head size went from cantaloupe size to that of a watermelon. It took a big head for all that brain capacity inside! My wife might argue about the validity of that last point. She has often complained about how she was hoodwinked into marrying someone who’s favorite childhood trophy was awarded for long distance peeing. She tells me that I don’t know where anything belongs, how to lower the toilet seat, and most of all that I barely know the mathematical meaning of pi. That last part is very important to her (that and the peeing). Her credo is “if you can’t find the square root of the universe you certainly won’t be able to cook a good meal!” How they relate I couldn’t tell you. Don’t tell her that I don’t get it though because I have her convinced that I know what I’m doing (in the kitchen if not the bathroom).

Well, I do know hats and math too for that matter. Here is something she doesn’t even know. You can find your own hat size by measuring the circumference of your head and dividing by the mathematical formula pi (3.1459265)! For example the circumference of my head is 23.25 inches. When divided by pi that leaves me with a 7 ½ hat size, also known in some circles as “fathead.” If she wants to know how her butt looks in a pair of pants lets see her figure it out with math! When she asks, I pull the brim of my cap down over my eyes, shake my head, and hope she goes away.

That aside, one thing is for sure. I spent t30 plus years waiting to get a genuine Washington Senators baseball cap. How lucky it is for me that the new version of the team, The Washington Nationals caps are exactly the same color and scheme as was the Senators’. The signature “W” on the front is also exactly the same! I’m in heaven! You don’t know how sad it can be until you see the face on a 35 year old that has his head squished into a cap sized to fit a 12 year old. It made for a lot of bad pictures.

Actually there are hat people and non-fedora individuals. There are those that should be instructed to wear the cap over their face, but that is another matter all together. In the 34 years without a long-ball fence at RFK stadium the hat has gone through many a change. If you haven’t noticed then you’re one of those afore mentioned bonnet haters. You are probably among a group with usually odd shaped heads (sometimes known as blockheads or knuckleheads). You could use a cap most effectively to cover your need to be in a traveling circus freak show.

Back in the good ol’ hat days each one had an individual size to it. They had little tags on the inside of the rim that stated the size. As a kid once you knew the size you didn’t have to put your head in each one to see if it fit. Just looking for the tag could avoid a lot of useless sweating on some hat store guy’s inventory. Today the haberdashery is not a common site in the mall. As the commitment to caps waned the addition of the adjustable strap in the rear of the cap meant you could keep a hat from cradle to grave. Too bad they didn’t think of that before my team headed to the oilfields of Texas. Those caps however lacked a certain quality. In a word they sucked! Usually some synthetic inferior material was used and passed off as convenient to us which made them very affordable. Now even those types of hats are on the way out.

The newest trend is in the one size fits all elastic band baseball cap. There are actually stores dedicated to selling nothing more than sports caps. What kind of lonely, axe wielding type of individual owns such a one dimensional shop? I can live with the newest kind of hats most of the time. The one I found I like however, looks like I’m wearing a jockey’s riding cap. Not a good thing when you’re of a smaller stature. I don’t need to wear it at the horse racing track lest I get corralled by some trainer and be told to “mount up.” That kind of instruction only works at home on a weekend evening after a couple of adult beverages.

What is more precious, concealing, and easier on the eye than the ability to cover a bad hair day?The hat is a common device used by many a models especially in Hollywood. I’m convinced that those celebrities you see often with hats on who are caught off guard on the cover of The National Enquirer would shock you if you saw them with no make up at all. I think that especially of the cute and insane ones like Brittany Spears. I’m sure without all of the pancake batter and gunk on her face she’d look like Earnest Borgnine after a long Saturday night at the bar in New Caladonia!

Those of us in the common folk arena know the virtue of a well placed baseball cap. I’m not talking about the kids that wear them backwards or sideways. They are really wearing them strait it’s their heads that are on crooked! These are the same guys who think their waist is around their thighs and that we want to know what color boxers they have on. That is almost as bad as the plumbers that work on you house, and God knows hey don’t wear any underwear! I’m talking about a fine well made cap that makes a statement, not in the way it’s worn but simply for the insignia like my Senators hat. Of course that hat always said “I root for losers,” but then again you have to be one to root for one. So there’s a new team in town with a completely new ballpark, and an old familiar hat that finally fits once again. Now if I could just understand how pi fits into the ballgame I’m sure I could learn how to cook. Then again why bother. There’s always ballpark food!