The Things We Love

This is a hat worn for many years by your great-great grandfather, ninos. He was my grandpa. I remember him as a good man, although his younger sons remember him as the town drunk. I suppose we knew him best at different times. His heavy drinking years were well past when I was growing up in the house next door. Grandpa was gentle and patient, a man who read books and wondered about the way of the world. He had an air of inner sadness but now that I am older, I understand how many different moods and meanings that could have.

I will be writing about this branch of your family in the coming years, grandchildren, and you will hear more of this man, my father's father. He was from a generation that favored hats and he wore this one every day for as long as I knew him. He put it on when he went out the door and took it off when he returned and it is very much a part of my memory of the man. Now it is old and dirty and beginning to be consumed by moths or other vermin. No one wants it and so I have taken this picture as a keepsake. I can't bear to put Grandpa's hat in the trash (although he would if he were still around and could afford a new one size 7 3/8; Grandma would toss it for sure) so I think I will take it along with a quart bottle of Olympia beer, if they still make Olympia, and leave it on his grave at Star. An easy out, you may say, but I think Grandpa wouldn't mind.