Here’s Yer Hat, What’s Yer Hurry?
Every year my family would make the pilgrimage to the place they called Home, a desolate stretch of potato country in upstate Maine near the Canadian border, the place my brother and I took their ashes a few years ago. Their parents, my grandparents, lived there all their lives and so, without question, no matter what part of the country we lived in at the time, we loaded up the station wagon and hauled our nuclear family back there for a few weeks’ vacation. Mississippi, North Carolina, Georgia, Wisconsin … didn’t matter, we hit the road, stayed at auto courts on the way, ate out of Mom’s packed cooler for days at a stretch.
My dad’s old man, Grampy to us boys, was a hard drinking, foul mouth, adulterous roughneck who adored his grandkids, built them rafts for the cabin by the river, taught them how to play poker, showed them how to drive offroad in his jeep mowing down saplings while he laughed and howled. Short as he was, he was bigger than life to us kids. My old man didn’t much like him, not the man who cheated on his mom, but year after year we came back. When Dad went off to war at 18, the advice he got standing at the train station, possibly the last time the two would talk, was one sentence: Keep it in your pocket. Okay, pa…. thanks for the wisdom.
When we packed up to go and said our goodbyes another year, Gramp would hand me his old fedora to keep. Folks ask me too often why I wear a hat all the time, usually a beat up old one, and I guess, without playing psychologist without a license, this is probably why. Or maybe I just like my head being warm….
The last year we visited, I was about 16. My grandfather was looking older than I remembered, plenty slower, a few drinks shy of being the hellion of yesteryear. At the door as we were leaving to go back to Wisconsin he handed me his hat from the hook by the door. I said thanks and see you next year. He surprised me when he shook his head and said, “Probably not.”
I think I took his meaning but only when we were motoring away. My dad muttered something about how he should have kept quiet about this when I mentioned what he’d said. I never, of course, saw Grampy again. He died of cancer shortly after. Later, after college, I started wearing hats, still do. My old man, every visit, would make disparaging comments. Family traditions die hard, I guess. Or he just worried I was turning into his father, the reprobate.
Tags: A Hat Makes the Man, Family Traits, Reprobate Relatives