Capping: A life

Baseball caps are the badge of retirement worn by men driving 15 mph under the speed limit and squeezing the oranges at Weis. Or so I thought. I vowed never to be that man, vowed never to wear a cap.

I was never a hat man. Playground wisdom 70 years ago was that just as a firm handshake was the key to economic success, slicked back, perpetually plastered hair was requisite for success in intimate relations.

Thus I bonded with Brylcreme (“A little dab’ll do ya!”) in my teens, rumored a favorite of soldiers since it kept their hair in place during battle – and eschewed hats, living my entire adult life virtually lidless.

But here I am at 85, and my nickname might as well be “Chapeau.” Why? It just can’t be that I have so little hair now that the once two-week haircut has morphed into a two-month one. Or that I now have a bald spot to hide.

This cap phenomenon needs some research. Let’s begin with an inventory.

My hat gallery contains a menagerie of River Hawks, Horned Frogs, Greyhounds, and Bulldogs in loving homage to and living re-enactments of the academic pursuits of my grandchildren.

The “Whiz Kids” of 1950 performed my baseball baptism, so naturally I have a Phillies cap, but, less obviously, a Cincinnati Reds cap brings back memories early in Little League of my idol Ted “Big Klu” Kluszewski, he of the home-run propelling bulging biceps we all publicly envied by rolling up our skinny armed sleeves.

Donning a Pottsville Maroons cap generates a mental film clip of what it was like for a revered ancestor to play professional football in the 1920s in the awesomely named Anthracite League, a name that conjures images of the game played at its most Neanderthal, when men were men!

A cap with three joined flags indicates our solid links with neighbors Mexico and Canada in these turbulent economic times. And an “Iceland” cap kindles dreams of the Land of the Midnight Sun as the president muses controversially about its possible statehood.

Perhaps my most serious cap reads “Human Beings ... Colors May Vary,” indicating my sincere and heartfelt desire to live up to core Quaker-speak at the Meeting House where I spend my Sunday worship: “to see the God in everybody.”

Well, this brief inventory is revealing. My cap ensemble functions as a representation of the many facets of my life, like my personal autobiography channel on an Ancestry.com cable network.

And I certainly am now wedded to the cap. I even wear one inside the house. Right now as I write, I’m wearing, in beautiful mauve, “Built in the Forties” – and still running!