hat head

Right around the time I started blogging I picked up a Raymond Savignac poster for an old Reynolds pen ad that read: écrit sans fin. Write without end.

I dropped a girlfriend of mine a line to tell her. When she and her partner split and wrangled with visiting privileges for their baby girl, she – and subsequently I – learned all about transitional objects -- and though I meant it half jokingly I felt, oddly, that this Savignac poster was mine. She had been giving me hard time for working myself into a grave and I wanted her to know that I had found my transitional object to help me transfer into something new.

I wasn’t sure what it was yet, but I could feel it coming. And come it did: within a month I had stepped into a new job and was blogging regularly, something that turned out to be good medicine.

Well kids, this last weekend I stumbled on another one.



Don't laugh.

Something grabbed me when I passed by a hat shop in Virginia City, Nevada over the weekend. I’ve always wanted a cowboy hat, and always felt foolish for wanting one. But for some reason this weekend, I just went ahead and did it.

I don’t know why, and I don’t know what, but I knew I had to have it.

It wasn’t easy: if it’s not yet obvious to y’all, I have a really big head. So it took some doing to find one that fit. And then I was headed in completely the wrong style direction – looking for something camel brown and sort of bowler-like. But the fellow working the floor – his name was Codger, and he was grey and grizzled just like he should have been – worked patiently with me, steering me to just the thing.

Black. Kinda caberello-like.

After a good twenty, twenty-five minutes of looking and deciding (long for me – I’m a dash and grab shopper) Codger pulled down just the one, and I knew that I was done.

At the register I shook his hand, thanked him for his help, and set the hat on my head. He wanted to know what I planned to do with it: did I ride? No, I said sheepishly, I’d be wearing it around Chicago.

“Well that’s all right,” he said, in that slow quiet tempo that only cowboys know like their own true religion. “That’s all right.” And then he paused before he delivered his benediction, saying: “You’ve got a good hat head.”