Keeping Things For Good

Might I be nuts?

I never really noticed it before, and as such it never has bothered me, but this past week I’ve come to realize that I have a bad tendency to ‘keep things for good.’

It was my hats that finally made me realize it.

Photo by Brice Cooper on Unsplash

I’m a man with a hat collection. So I tell myself. Others might claim that I’ve got a hat obsession. Is it bad to say that I have an entire closet full of hats in hat boxes in my home office, and another closet half filled with hats sans boxes?

Something struck me just before this past Christmas.

My wife and I decided that instead of buying trinkets for each other, we would buy ourselves a really nice together gift. We decided that we wanted a really fine blanket to cover our bed. Not a normal blanket, but a woven wool piece of art.

We looked at a lot of them as Christmas approached.

Then one day Melinda grabbed me and showed me the one she picked out. Woven wool, in an explosion of colors, with a hat in its center. A translation into wool of a painting of a hat hanging on a fencepost.

I kind of objected to it at first, because hats are my thing, not hers. I’ve never seen her actually wear a hat, and I’m quite certain she’d be happier if I never realized that hats exist. I insisted that we keep looking for something that would suit us both.

But it wasn’t to be. She said something about having chosen to marry a hat guy, and being glad to have married a hat guy. So, we bought each other this fancy hat blanket for Christmas.

That, along with the upcoming session of our State Legislature in really rainy Olympia, got me pondering hats once again. It doesn’t take much.

Now, I’ve got hats that range in price from maybe twenty-five bucks to somewhere around a thousand bucks.

Most often, I wear hats that cost about a hundred bucks, and have done so for a great many years. I love ‘em, they last forever, and I don’t have to worry overly much about accidents happening to them. Indeed the one I wear most often is decades old now.

I don’t wear those really expensive hats though.

Nope. I save them for good occasions.

I’ve got that one really fancy looking hat made for me down in Oregon that I view as only really suitable for events that call for a tuxedo. Hell, I’ve owned it for twenty or twenty five years now, but I’ve only worn it maybe twice.

I’ve got that not fancy looking, but super high end hat made for me over in Idaho that I wore maybe a dozen times then put in it’s protective case, apparently never to see the light of day again.

It’s all a matter of ‘keeping them for good’ you see.

What I seem to have realized this past week is that I’m not going to live forever!

What in the hell am I saving these things for?

At my current rate, the vast majority of my hats are going to look brand-spankin-new when I croak. And the Daughters aren’t into hats. These treasures, sooner or later, would all end up at the thrift store, still looking new, still in their original boxes.

Now, I’ve got to say, that’s a wee bit nuts.

So a couple of them have come out of their boxes. The very best one I own is sitting atop the huge burl of wood that I use as a hat stand, ready to go atop my head for any occasion beyond chores. Another great quality, but not exceedingly expensive hat is now atop the piano, standing ready to go for when I do handle those chores.

All of this has me thinking.

Are there things so precious to us that we don’t actually use them, keeping them like new instead?

If so, is that nuts?