When You Wear a Hat as Long as I Have—Murfin Verse Redux

The hat was still young and healthy when I wore it at this Peace Vigil in Harvard, Illinois in March of 2002.

One Fall day back in 2014 I was stumped for a blog post.  Everything I found either bored me or would require such an enormous effort at research and probably turn into one of those things that runs to 6,000 words.  I know that no one reads those posts unless a blood relative is the subject.  Sometime I do them anyway if the topic interests me, but I always regret it.  Anyway, both stumped and unmotivated.  So I lay idly on a couch for an hour or so, turning my old brown felt hat over and over in my hand closely examining the damning evidence of long hard usage.  After a while I said to myself—aloud because the house was empty—“I may as well just write about the damn thing!”  Five minutes later I was pounding out the ode below.

Once again, I have nothing better to offer, so here it is again.

The hat in question was a Christmas gift from my wife Kathy in 2001.  I was in desperate need of a new dress lid.  My everyday work hat was an Indiana Jones style brown fedora I had acquired in the mid-80’s and re-creased into my favored style with a peaked center ridge pinched on either side and the brim slouched.  I wore it every day to work as a head building custodian in Cary, Illinois and to whatever second job I held--at the time a second shift gas station clerk  at a Crystal Lake Mobile.  It was battered, sweat stained, filthy, and looked like it had been run over by a garbage truck.

The trouble was my current dress hat was not in much better shape, even though it was a much higher quality sombrero.  It was a nice silver belly Stetson XXX Open Road.  I had likewise reshaped it but with it higher crown  and a broader brim bound with a ribbed silk ribbon it had once gleamed spectacularly atop my head.  It was then only five years old but because of  it its light color now looked grimy and dingy.  A hole was even emerging from the front of the peak where I grabbed the hat between my thumb and forefingers to take off and on.  It clearly no longer qualified as my dress hat and Kathy was embarrassed to be seen with me in either hat.  She was a motivated giver.

Kathy spotted the hat on sale during a Christmas shopping expedition we made to Springhill Mall, the closest big merchandising Mecca in a still bustling Sears.  Later, when we split up to check out other stores in the Mall, she doubled back and bought it then hid it somehow in the car.  It was a light brown, soft felt with a low, flat crown and a wide brim.  It had a narrow, light beige sued band that had not been well cut—it varied in length from here to there.  It was a then popular style of an exaggerated fedora with an extra wide brim, but was on the low end of the quality scale.  She paid about $15 for her prize.

When I opened her present on Christmas morning, I was a bit skeptical.  I had never worn a hat with that low a crown.  It would not hold my attempts to re-crease it in my favored center peak.  It would just pop back into shape.  The damn hat had a will of its own.  It would not be anything other than how it was made.  Sigh.  But I needed a hat, so I put it to work.

A week after Christmas it got it’s baptism of activism, when I wore it to a small New Year’s Day peace vigil organized  by the American Friends Service Committee—the Quakers—by winter d1ormant Buckingham Fountain.  Kathy and I met my former sister-in-law Arlene Brennan and her husband Michael, my nephew Ira S. Murfin and a girl he knew who was on her way to a winter job shooing bison back into Yellowstone Park to keep them from being shot by Montana ranchers.  It was the first of scores of vigils, marches, rallies, and demonstrations over the next 16 years at which I wore the hat.  Paired with a trench coat, it went with me to a giant anti-war march in Washington, D.C. later that January and sheltered by head through weekly roadside vigils that the McHenry County Peace Group kept up over the next two and a half years through all sorts of inclement weather.

The hat and I at the Haymarket monument in Chicago one May Day after I led a Labor service at a U.U. Congregation.

When I wrote and posted my poem three years ago, the old chapeau was still in daily service.  Today it has been demoted to rough duty status.  Although it has held its shape remarkably well and resists  popping holes  at pressure points—which eventually dooms my higher quality Stetsons—the fading and sweat stains can no longer be ignored.  I no longer wear it to my day job in Woodstock, unless there is heavy rain—its broad brim makes it the best rain hat I ever had.  It also holds up well when it is snowing so hard it measurably accumulates on the brim.  I still throw it on for the overnight shift gig down the street at the Circle K/Shell on weekend nights and will use it for yard work, snow shoveling,  or maybe when I walk the dog.

But despite its embarrassingly battered condition, I still break it out for all cool or cold weather protests or resistance events out of pure sentimentality.  Just last week it protected me on the cold, drizzly immigration prayer vigil and march to McHenry County Jail.  Like a reliable old comrade, the hat knew just what to do….

Last May Day in Chicago--the hat and Old Man showing wear.

When You Wear a Hat as Long as This One

When you wear a hat as long as this one—

            you know, the old brown one

            with the broad flat brim

            and low crown,

            the one Kathy bought you for Christmas

            the holiday after 9/11—

you learn to understand that the Universe

            is falling down upon you day after day

            that stardust, ashes, and cat dander

            sift unseen and constant

            day after day,

            year after year,

            one decade into the next

drifting into the creases of the crown,

            balling just a tad if you rub your

            thumb or fingers across the brim

            which has subtly changed color

            under the weight

nothing to be done about it

            the heaviest downpour does not

            wash it away,

            nor can you brush it,

            or beat it against your leg,

the stuff clings to the fine wool fibers

            of the soft felt

            and where the sweat and

            oil from your dirty hair

            touch it, it becomes a little hard

            and shiny

and the old band twisted and stained

            must be covered by one braided from

            bright fabrics somewhere in Nicaragua

            and even that band is faded and

            dusted in its folds and knots,

and the universe continues to fall unconcerned.

—Patrick Murfin