Dad hats π§’
π§ Pardon the mess β I’m renovating! π§
My dad has a pretty extensive collection of hats. A couple years ago he had an acute health event where he had to be hospitalized for weeks, so I went to visit home and help my mom. It was scary and sad. One afternoon at the house I was alone between hospital visits and looking for something to occupy time and brainspace and found many of his hats scattered in various places around the house, mostly closets.
I had a meditative moment with each hat, thinking about the significance of each. Some date back up to 30 years. Most are from places my dad visited β lots of national parks, some institutions that people in our family have been affiliated with like schools my sister and I attended, et cetera. Some are seemingly random, but all of the ones whose meaning I could discern seem to be associated with the things I know my dad loves: nature, travel, golf, education, Jesus, his daughters. Basically he’s just a Midwestern dad out there trying his best.
My dad recovered fully from that event and is okay now, thankfully, but obviously we didn’t know what the outcome was going to be at the time, so going through the hats was kind of a poignant and emotional exercise. It made me think about what it would be like when my parents are no longer on this earth and I will only have what they’ve left behind, which is their stuff, and me.
Farm Bureau AgriVisor
U.S. Air Force Museum
Alondra Golf Course
Alta Genetics USA
New Zealand
Arizona
Chicago Bears
Grand Canyon
Brighton, England
Bryn Mawr College
Cabrillo National Monument
Cadillac Mountain
Death Valley National Park
Devils Tower National Monument
Florida Gators
Grand Canyon National Park
George Washington National Forest
Illinois Farm Bureau
Israel National Parks Authority
Madrid
Masada
The Morton Arboretum
New Mexico
Nike (swoosh only)
Nike
Northwestern Medicine
Paris, France
The Great Passion Play
Pebble Beach
Penn
Phoenix
Pikes Peak
Plum Tree
Point Reyes National Seashore
Route 66
Salzburg
Scotland (blue)
Scotland (white)
Seneca Golf Course
San Francisco
Slone Construction Company
S.S. Badger
Superstition Mountains
Titleist
Tuzigoot National Monument
Universal Studios
Illinois Beach USA
Vancouver 2010
Las Vegas
Australian Wallabies
Zion National Park
not a hugger
Petrified Forest National Park
Pikes Peak
Pelican Golf
Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks
University of Oxford
Original Red Dirt Sedona Arizona
The Old Course St Andrews Links
Something interesting I noticed
This page is generated in Hugo using a flat file that loops through each hat and its caption. This process is not dissimilar to how I IRL physically "looped" through each hat and thought about what it meant. I thought that was funny (funny "huh", not funny "haha").