Capping Off a Decade

You're much cuter without the hat. 

Mom offered that bit of unsolicited advice before her usual sendoff—Be careful! (which to me has an undertone of Don't die! and is why I endeavor to find a less angst-ridden phrase to offer my boys when they start leaving me). 

Being my mother's daughter, all I could offer was a look of fake offense and one Pfft! pushed through my clear-glossed lips before taking off for a dinner date with a girlfriend. 

In 37 years of knowing my mother, I've rarely received unsolicited advice. It's not her style when it comes to loved ones, or even strangers as long as they don't cross her threshold. Speaking of thresholds, I've seen home-protection signs that say "This home is guarded by the Good Lord and a gun. If you come here to do harm, you'll meet them both." Some of them swap out the gun for a German Shepherd. My mom should come with one of those warning signs. She'd be the German Shepherd, not the gun. 

Maybe I didn't look cute in my cap. My tiny head and narrow face are a finicky pair, but that cap is a storyteller. How could I resist. 

It first spoke to me in 2001 from the shelf at Yesterday's News, a vintage store on East Carson Street in the Southside of Pittsburgh. I discovered East Carson during college and would head north on the interstate every once in a while to walk up and down its busy sidewalks and relish the thrill of being somewhere unfamiliar.  Of the many sins life commits against me, familiarity is cardinal; I like change, perhaps too much. After getting my fill of sartorial storytellers on the racks at the News, I'd head to The Beehive for coffee a few doors down, or up, depending on how well you read a map. I don't have time for details; I just sniff out where I want to go. 

The Beehive is one of those places that makes peeing more laborious than it should be, especially when you don't feel like having your book-reading or note-taking or people-watching sesh interrupted by a bodily function: You have to ask the barista for a key, and the barista is always busy. So you have to wait, resenting every long-winded latte wishlist while all the muscles in your lower body try to reign in your raging bladder, and then you're handed a giant, painted chunk of wood with a key attached to a chain worthy of a junkyard dog. 

On one of my visits to The Beehive, a young guy with a young son approached me. Our conversation was brief, or maybe not; interesting, or not. The guy was tall, or maybe average height; blonde or brunette. All I know is he asked me out and that, back in Morgantown that evening, I wondered about the intricacies of dating a man with a son, even though I already knew I didn't want to date him at all. Something about my time at The Beehive feels a little Jim Jarmusch, and by the way, I don't like his films. 

My Yesterday's News cap has been on a few dinner dates, only with girlfriends. My friend Ivy gave me a photo from a date in 2002 with our friend Ann (who I dubbed Granny Panty Annie, for obvious reasons). It was an actual printed photo since we didn't have phone cameras yet. I'm sitting against the backdrop of exotic wall hangings at Asian Garden, a local favorite, where I always ordered the vegetarian duck, Spicy, please, with a side of fried spring rolls. The bill of my newsboy-style cap is snapped together, which was the way I wore it back then even though I couldn't decide if it was unflattering. I was making an Austin Powers-type face, with my finger up to my lips, my head tilted to the side of the room where the metal lunch buffet sat forlorn, cold and empty because it was dinner time. The big white collar of my blue-and-white striped shirt hung like bird wings from the v-neck of a snug, tan sweater. Later that evening, the three of us hung out at the apartment on top of the antique store on Pleasant Street that was only ever lived in by musicians and artists, as far as I knew. That year, a couple of friends lived there, one of whom had been the frontman of a seminal band in the post-hardcore era of the 90s. I began learning about "posts" (post-rock, post-punk, postmodern art and literature) once I entered my own post-hometown era of the late 90s/early aughts. 

In the year 2003, my boyfriend made a charcoal drawing of me in that cap. It had a round, ball-like tassel made of short, thick yarn that snapped to the top, which I never wore except in the drawing. After that session, I put the tassel aside to preserve the cap's original state, in an archival sort of way. "Archival" being a word plucked straight from the mouth of my charcoal-drawing boyfriend 10 years ago when he was describing the metal tacks he used for building canvases that would become part of his artistic opus. Where is that tassel now? Hopefully stuffed in a bag somewhere among my belongings, which have been taking up most of the space in dad's garage since the evening—two years and 60-some days ago—I returned from Tennessee.

Memphis is where I wore that cap on the second occasion I was in the presence of a person who has changed my life forever. We were at the P&H Cafe (short for Poor and Hungry), a small, dumpy joint on Madison best known for a movie of the same name by Memphis' own Craig Brewer, who wrote and directed the underground-gone-Hollywood hit Hustle & Flow. The P&H had photos tacked up everywhere and one of my favorite veggie burgers in town. 

It was karaoke night and a friend's birthday when a big group of us were celebrating with stick-on mustaches. We sat at a long table beside a row of booths, me across from the man who three years later would become the father of my son. He and I barely, if at all, spoke that evening, but I went home curious about this handsome guy who owned a skateboard shop and kept to himself despite being in cahoots with a raucous group of tattooed punks. He sent me a friend request shortly thereafter, and thus began our path of two years of on-again, off-again dating, the subtext of which would be mostly repulsive in hindsight were it not for the fact of my precious boy. When I look back on that night, I don't get caught up in the details of the pain it foreshadowed. Instead, I think about the photo of me with a stick-on mustache stuck to the butt of my cutoff jean shorts, and I remember being young, free, and fun. 

My mom says I'm cuter without that cap. I'll keep on wearing it. I like its soft fall colors. I like that there's a snap on the bill that looks out of place when it's unsnapped, which is the way I wear it these days. I like that it had a history long before me, and I like that I've given it an even richer history over these 10 years. "Cute" is in the eye of the beholder anyway. My warm wool storyteller with the absent tassel is a keeper. A piece of the archives of me.