Silly Hats and Other Necessities

I went shopping with a old friend yesterday, a girls' day out.  We rarely get to do this.  Our lives are too frantic, too overscheduled with the obligations of family, career, and all the other things that pile up in addition.  Yesterday, though, she found a sitter, and we both were off for the holiday, so we took a chance to go out to a Japanese restaurant we both like and catch up. 

After we ate, we went junkin'.  For those of you not familiar with that ancient Southern tradition, junkin' involves going into a large building full of all kinds of stuff, some of it valuable, some of valuable only to you.  This is known as a "Flea Market."   These can be easily identified by the presence outside of clawfoot tubs, metal wagonwheels, iron bedsteads, and racks and racks of bottles.  You should not, of course, expect to see fleas at the flea market once you arrive.  If you do, you should probably leave post-haste...  Once you are there, you amuse yourself by marveling at the grand diversity of what people have kept in their homes over the past seventy years or so and by pouncing on whatever of those items, be it milk glass, NASCAR memorabilia, blue bottles, real and faux McCoy, costume jewelry, or repainted furniture that catches your own particular fancy.  Then begins the delicate and polite haggling of the South....

I love junkin'.  I love to see all the stuff.  Like almost everybody else I know, I collect a few things.  Well, okay, more than a few things.  Well, okay.  American Pickers would have an absolute freakin' field day, need to bring two vans and a back-up team to load stuff at my house.(If I chose to sell those darling boys anything, that is...)  I have grown up in a family of collectors, and I live in an ancient house full of those collections.  I use everything I collect, all the little planters become desk supply holders, sorter bins.  All the hankies are actually cleaned and put back into use.  If I buy a dish, it's used.  As for the forties and fifties luncheonette tablecloths I so rarely find, they are the glorious crowning touch to my holiday tables.  It makes me happy to see these old things brought back to purpose, makes me feel connected to the past, to history when I use these things.

Yesterday, as we went in, in the very first stall I saw a hat... 

Now, I am a hat fan.  A person either loves hats or hates them.  People are not indifferent towards hats.  I have several, but I don't always wear them because until I got my hair cut recently, they would flatten it out.  Now, with my hair cut so short, my hair is much sleeker, so it's not a problem.  Enter the hat.

This hat is the end-all, be-all of hats.  My friend described it as "Mrs. Napoleon on Her Way to Church."  It is black and white with a huge bow, dangly crystals, the whole nine-yards.  I fell hopelessly in love.  I grabbed it and stuck it on my head.  My friend burst into laughter and grabbed her iPhone.  The resulting pictures are now my FB and Twitter pics, the first time on Twitter that my actual face has ever been seen there, ending all those comments from the obnoxious asses who still think it's funny to do the whole, "Will the real you PLEASE STAND UP..." tweet. 

We walked around the flea market, and my friend and I made plans surrounding the hat.  We were going to find her one, match these elaborate chapeaus with something gown-like (I have a black spaghetti-strap floor-length velvet gown that would work with mine, I think), and since we both play on Sunday nights, we were just going to show up right before it was time to play, walk in and sit down at the organ and the piano with the utmost dignity and begin and see if anybody noticed. The reaction would have been priceless, especially since we almost always play in jeans.....

Can I wear this hat out shopping to Wal-Mart? (pauses to consider....still thinking about it....)  Well....no.  Probably not.  Well, I mean, I could, but.... No.  Okay.  NO. I won't.  It would be fun, and I would enjoy it tremendously, but I won't do that.  But by the same token, could I leave that marvelous confection of imagination and wonder there hanging so forlorn in that flea market stall?  No.  It was like something from Carnival, regal in its way, and it made me laugh.  That's enough for me.