The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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.

A woman sitting next table to me at the newly remodeled Island Café said, “You’re lucky my husband isn’t here.” Since I hadn’t made a pass at her, I asked why was that and she said he used to wear a battered, beat up, half composted hat a lot like mine. “He called it his ‘Go to Hell ‘ hat.”

It’s amazing how this old fedora of mine elicits continuous comments and sometimes physical interventions. I was accosted by the Safeway security guard up north awhile back who demanded I stop. “Stop? Who, me?” I asked and she insisted I produce a receipt of purchase after accusing me of stealing the two half racks of beer I was loading into my truck. Not that my hat made me a Prime Suspect. Safeway, let it be known far and wide, is a Profiler. And apparently my sombrero fit their profile.

Sitting in an airport lounge a few years ago, an attractive stewardess sat herself down next to me to ask which I was, a writer or a musician? She at least didn’t ask if I was an artist or a bum. Or an old geezer with a Go to Hell hat or a shoplifter.

I’ve worn hats since I was a kid in high school, mostly the ones my grandpa gave me when he’d updated to a new one. Me, I don’t update. And anyway, I don’t have an impressionable grandkid to lead down some non-conformist primrose path. A hat makes a good umbrella. It keeps my head warm and it hides my uncut hair, saving me hundreds of dollars in bad haircuts. I don’t go anywhere without one, sort of like a credit card only the truth is, it makes getting credit harder, more profiling, I guess. So I wear mine until it falls pretty much to pieces, then, worst case, I’ll put em on my garden scarecrow to give the crows and the deer a good laugh.