Call Me Skipper

Some men are bikers, some men are cowboys, some are rednecks, and some are nerds. Me, I’m a hat guy.

When I was a kid, growing up, all men wore hats. Whether they put on a suit and went to an office to work, or climbed into a saddle and spent the day working on top of a horse, men didn’t leave the house until they had their hat on. If they did, they wouldn’t be properly dressed.

Maybe it’s because I’m old-fashioned, maybe it’s because I’m bald and my head gets sunburned really easy and I’ve already had one bout of skin cancer, or maybe it’s just because I’m vain and I think they make me look better; but for whatever reason, I always have a bunch of hats around.

While I wear a baseball cap much of the time, just because it’s quick and easy to put on, I really do favor fedoras. Here are three I’ve worn at different times over the years.

My dad once told me that if you buy good guns and good hats, and take care of them, they will last you the rest of your life. He was right. I bought this medium brimmed Stetson Gun Club hat at a shop in Payson, Arizona close to 30 years ago, and still have it today.

And I’m not averse to wearing a straw hat sometimes, too.

I’ve also got a couple of wide brimmed Tilly hats, which are excellent for everything from hiking or kayaking, to fishing and kite flying.

But apparently my buddy Jim Lewis has decided that now that I have a pontoon boat, I need to get nautical. So yesterday he brought me this new hat. It’s a couple of sizes too small, and I think a suggestion was made that if I went and soaked my head, it might shrink. Not the hat, just soak the head.

So I guess you can now call me Skipper. Which that makes Jim our own Gilligan. I sure hope Miss Terry wants to be Mary Ann, because I liked her a lot more than I did Ginger.

We have had so much going on that I haven’t had the pontoon boat in the water yet. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been wet. It rained long and hard Monday afternoon and night, and again yesterday. In fact, we had tornado warnings out for much of central Florida most of the day yesterday.

Fortunately, if any touched down they missed our area. It seems like that happens quite often when we have severe weather forecasts. The worst of the storms seem to split and go around us to the North and South, leaving Edgewater and New Smyrna Beach on the fringe.

We haven’t set up the scissor trailer to put the boat on it yet, so the pontoon is still sitting in the driveway. Monday evening we looked out and there was a big puddle of water collecting on the boat’s cover instead of running off. We were afraid it would tear the cover, so Terry went inside the boat and under the cover through the back gate to prop the cover up some more and push the water off.

I was outside with her, and as she was getting ready to do it the timer clicked over and our lawn sprinklers went on. I quickly stepped away from them and closer to the boat just as Terry pushed up on the cover from the inside. I had to jump sideways to keep from getting a bath of cold rainwater. I’m pretty sure if anybody would have seen me, they would have said, “for a fat boy, he moves pretty fast!”

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Thought For The Day – When you are no longer devastated by criticism, nor intoxicated by praise, you have mastered your life.