Hats on!

I have a thing for hats, and — given the parlous state of my thinning crown — I probably should. Over the years and from all the places I’ve been to, I’ve built up a collection of hats and caps, which now adorn a hat tree in our room like pendulous fruit.

I’ve always wondered why we don’t wear hats more often in this country, which has perfect hat weather—not rain or shine, but rain and shine, in both of which cases some headgear would come in handy. We Pinoys used to be a hat-wearing people. Look at any picture from prewar Manila and you’ll find most men happily hatted, while the women are draped in native scarves and shawls.

You might agree with the American satirist P. J. O’Rourke, whose blunt opinion was that “Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.” Indeed, I can imagine some people foreswearing them, in the same way that I know men who will obstinately refuse to carry umbrellas, no matter the downpour brewing above their heads.

But the hat — or headgear in general — has enjoyed something of a resurgence, thanks to the likes of Justin Timberlake, whose trucker hats (since replaced by fedoras) caused a shortage at 7-11, where he got them from, when he came out with his first solo video in 2002. Earlier than that, the Blues Brothers matched their short-brim fedoras with classic Wayfarers for that Men in Black look that turned ’60s-austere into ’80s-cool.

Of course, baseball-type caps never left the scene. I remember being a kid and wearing the itchy (because woven straw) version of one, plastered with squiggly red felt letters that read “Souvenir of Tagaytay.” Today they come in distinctly more fashionable fabrics and designs, and you can even have yours custom-made at the mall, if you want your moniker (whether it’s RHONDA, RHETT, or RHOMMEL) emblazoned on the crown for the world to either marvel or snicker at.

Our cousin Lando has a collection of these caps, coming from all over the world, presents from our travels and from friends and relatives. Lando’s a simple man with simple pleasures, but it must give him a lift to pay a visit to his favorite off-track betting station every Friday evening with a new cap to toss into the air when his winning horse comes in.

In the poker rooms I now inhabit, caps and hats — as well as hoodies — are de rigueur. The rooms can get arctic-chilly, first of all, but more to the pokerfaced point, those brims can be useful in shading your eyes, so no one can see them glimmer when the nut flush you’ve gambled your mother’s earrings on hits the table.

For poker duty, my hat of choice is my bone-white Tilley Endurable, beloved of field archeologists such as UP’s Vic Paz, and modestly self-advertised as “the best outdoor hat in the world”, made of “10-ounce, USA-treated cotton duck, solid British brass hardware, sewn with Canadian persnickitiness.” (I suppose that tells you how seriously I take Texas Hold’em, as though I were marching off to Assyria to do battle with heathen armies.)

No hat, however, was more lethal than Oddjob’s. Who he? Boomers like me will remember Auric Goldfinger’s Korean bowler-hatted Korean henchman in Goldfinger, who specialized in decapitating statues and people by throwing his razor-edged hat like a Frisbee.

My hats are of the decidedly gentler sort, utterly kind to my tender noggin and some of them quite happy to be sat on and scrunched any which way. Every summer, for the Baguio writers’ workshop, I dust off a tobacco-colored fedora that I picked up as a graduate student in Milwaukee 20 years ago. I have fancier hats — another fedora from a flea market in Amsterdam, and a gorgeous wide-brimmed Akubra from Australia that would’ve done Indiana Jones proud — but it’s this plain-jane $19 felt hat from Walgreen’s that I have the most affection for, having come so far with me. It’s one of those hats you can crumple into a ball and stuff into your bag and forget; you take it out and it pops back into perfect shape like a flower.

In late April, just when the sunflowers bloom on University Avenue signaling the graduation season, I put on a barong, the sablay that’s become UP’s sash of honor, and a straw Panama hat that goes best with the mellowing of the summer and the yellowing of the hour. This would be one of two hats I picked up during the Pahiyas in Lucban some years ago, each of them going for the outrageously cheap price of just P150 — worlds apart from the superfine and hyper-expensive top-of-the-line Panamas that can cost upwards of $5,000, and reputedly take their makers 1,000 hours to create.

Mine’s a hat I can afford to lose to the wind on a gloriously happy day — but I’d rather not.

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Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.