It’s the same old drill whenever we go out.
We’ll shut off the light in the kitchen. We’ll grab the keys from the hall. I’ll get my purse, my shoes and my smart phone.
And the husband will grab his hats. Yes, hats. As in plural.
“Wait,” he’ll say, every single time. “This one? Or this one? Or how about this one?”
The husband will proceed to perform a fashion show of sorts, awaiting my opinion. He’ll try on the blue and grey hockey hat. Then the green and white football hat. Then the brown and yellow baseball hat.
“Blue,” I’ll say.
“Really?” he’ll ask. “What’s wrong with the green?”
“OK,” I’ll say. “Green then.”
“You think so?” he’ll wonder. “Not the brown?”
The issue is not so much that the husband is afflicted with some type of ball cap vanity condition. The issue is that the husband owns, oh, several hundred different hats. Or several dozen anyway.
This strikes me as odd, given that the husband does not have several dozen heads. He has just the one, and can wear just one hat at a time.
Also odd, given that the husband would probably not even consider himself a hat collector, not in the way that some people collect coins or stamps or garden gnomes. He just, well, sees a hat — and he buys it.
In our house, there are hats everywhere: in the hall closet, in the bedroom closet, in the furnace room, in the laundry room. If there was any room in the pantry, I’m sure they’d be there too, stuffed next to the peanut butter.
“I can’t find my hat,” the husband informed me the other day.
“Your hat?” I said. “Which one?”
“The one I got in Mexico,” he said. “The Seahawks hat. You seen it anywhere?”
“Why don’t you look in the oven,” I suggested.
“The oven?” he said. “Why would it be there?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe because there’s no room anywhere else?”
In a perfect world — make that, a perfect house — we would have a dedicated hat room, where the caps would be sorted according to colour, style and fit.
Alas, that’s not about to happen, since we need our rooms for other purposes. Like sleeping, say. And bathing.
For the foreseeable future then, it will be hats status quo around our place. The hats will be everywhere. And four or five will be pulled out whenever we leave the house, just so I can provide my opinion as to which will be hat of the day.
Not really sure why he asks for it, though. He’s always the one to decide.
