prairie point

the hat collector

Not long after I got out of college I bought a sports car, a second-hand Fiat Spyder. It was a fun car, kind of a cut-rate Alfa. It always seemed to be in need of repair. A buddy convinced me that I needed to adjust the valves myself because the mechanics never did it right. T had a special-order tool from Italy that would lift up a spring so that little discs could be inserted to give just the right clearance. I borrowed it and tackled the job one weekend.

I am not mechanically inclined and really shouldn’t be doing anything under the hood of a car. I don’t know what I did wrong but when I started it back up the engine turned over and then just froze solid. All the valves crashed into the top of the pistons and bent, freezing the engine up solid. Basically I had caused more damage to the engine than the whole car was worth. The only solution was to fix it myself. That’s how I became a driveway mechanic one summer. With T advising me I finally got it running again.

It was the only convertible I’ve ever owned and extremely impractical in Houston, a city where it is always either raining or else blazing hot. To keep the wind out of my hair I bought a cap with a visor - not a baseball cap but a leather cap similar to ones worn in the early part of the century. Some of the guys where I was working at the time thought it looked like a yacht cap and took to calling me "captain."

That was the beginning of my “hat collection.” Soon after I got the next one. As a favor to a friend I picked up his girl at the airport and drove out to a beach-house on Galveston Bay. A few weeks later I received a package in the mail. I guess she wasn’t impressed with the leather cap either because it was a new handmade cap. I still have both those, along with a number of others, souvenirs from trips, a beanie from my freshman year at college, and a grey felt businessman’s hat that my father used to wear in the fifties. I’ve got a few baseball caps too, and that is what I am most likely to be seen in these days.