Old Brown Hat
My writer’s muse only works part-time, due to my budget constraints. Lately, the muse has been leaving me little memos on the kitchen table. One recent note read, simply, "If these walls could talk."
This has led to meditations on the objects I come into contact with every day: the car, the meditation cushion, the coffee press, and so on. What if an oracle could get into a state of one-mind and allow these objects to ’speak’ through them? This led to some silly monologues, and one or two interesting ones; and it leads to further thoughts about how we sometimes endow objects with a personality. It’s created by thinking and imagination, of course, but what an interesting activity.
Like my beloved brown suede cap (which I’m wearing in the photo on the right).
If this hat were a man, it would be an old tattooed character holding court at the quiet end of a small bar, one of those bars built inside a cheap steel and aluminum building with no windows and a sign on the door reading “Brothers of Lithuania Social Club” or something like that, where the newest single on the jukebox is by Billy Ocean and the felt on the pool table is so torn that a game of billiards (for 75 cents) is something more like miniature golf. You can still drink Black Label for one dollar, if you don’t mind it’s a little warm because something’s wrong with the pump, and no one goes in there who doesn’t know everybody because it isn’t a place for meeting new people and marketing your personality, it’s a place for drinking alcohol with one eye on the game on the TV set bolted to the wall. If you’re not sitting at the bar you are sitting in one of their fiery orange plastic chairs they’ve had since they fixed the place up a little in 1981. There isn’t trouble there very often, and if there is, old Brown Hat quells it fast. He is a not peacemaker, but he is a peace keeper. He hardly ever has to break up a fight because people have heard that you never actually see Brown Hat make a fist or swing his arm – you just suddenly have a bloody nose and ache all over and can’t move your left leg. Thanks to this reputation, old Brown Hat can cool a fight with little more than a look. His position has not been challenged by younger men, because younger men don’t often come here, owing to the lack of young women. Old Brown Hat doesn’t know any jokes but he’ll laugh at any joke as long as it’s dirty. At home he listens to the classical music station and he recognizes Brahms and likes him, but nobody here will ever know that about the old BH. Old Brown Hat was a little too young to serve in WWII, but he was in the Navy in the 1950’s and had his heart broken by a Subic Bay beauty he wanted to marry, but she crushed him. He later married a hometown girl who is no longer with us, yet every day of his life his thoughts have turned to Luzon and Grande Island and his almond-eyed first love, and it takes a little effort to put his mind on something else, but he winces imperceptibly and carries on.
That’s what this hat is like.
