Men Without Hats

There's a lot to love about baseball. The greenest grass on the planet. The joy of sitting outside on a (increasingly) hot summer night eating peanuts and cracker jack, not caring if you ever get back. Growing up, I always wanted to be a baseball player (well, after the firefighter/astronaut phase and before the lawyer phase, so really there about a five-year window where I harbored dreams of being a professional baseball player before giving up on that dream when I realized my baseball talents were not really talents).

I don't get paid to
wear this...yet.

There were a multitude of reasons why I wanted to play in the Major Leagues. Sure, there was fame, fortune, and the opportunity to have a baseball card made of me. But you also get to wear a hat to work. And not a hard hat, which is not possibly cool and, to my knowledge, has never been featured in a rap video, but a baseball hat. A genuine, authentic baseball hat like the kind you can buy at any decent sporting goods store. Only I wouldn't have to buy it, they'd give it to me as part of my uniform. (I could do without the baseball pants, they always seemed unnecessarily hot for a game played outside in the summer.)

While I may not have become a professional baseball player (yet!), I have adopted the idea of wearing a hat all the time. Part of it is the fact that my eyes are sensitive to the light, part of it is showing random support a team that I'm not actually a member of and part of it is laziness on my part because wearing a hat means I don't have to comb my hair in the morning. And being that the job market in Wilmington is less than good, I've been wearing a hat fairly often.

I didn't realize just how often it was until I went to take our dog for her nightly walk without wearing one. It was overcast night and rather than my usual 20 minute walk, this was hopefully going to be a quick 10 minute trip. So I get the dog on  her leash and head out the door when the little guy said, "no, daddy no hat." (For those who don't speak toddler, that means, "Daddy doesn't have a hat on." Toddler speak isn't that difficult, so if you didn't understand that, it's likely you're just hoping I'll post a picture of an attractive woman at some point.) When I got back from walking the dog, the little guy, again, said "daddy no hat."

Just because I wear a hat (or visor) to the beach, pool, library, for a walk along the river, to the grocery store, to take him to preschool, to the park, or just around the house doesn't mean I always wear a hat of some kind. I do, occasionally, shower, and even at times do so without some sort of hat.