Project Cubbins: Hat Fifty

Hat 50 (left) with interior detail (right).

Day Fifty / Hat Fifty: In honor of the first (albeit very tiny) milestone of fifty hats -- one tenth of the way to the big 500 -- I've chosen a very, very special hat. It's a brown 4X beaver felt ten-gallon cowboy hat with multi-color Native American influenced woven hatband, interior tag reads "John B. Stetson Company" and size tag reads "7 1/4." Inside the crown is a multicolored silk depiction of a cowboy giving his horse a drink of water from his own cowboy hat.

This hat was gift to me many years ago -- I'm going to say close to forty years ago -- by my Uncle John Schweitzer. He also bought a matching one for my older brother Allan. There are random photos of us with these huge genuine cowboy hats over the years, but they always seemed too big for our still-growing heads.

My sainted mother, wanting to make sure the hat and I stayed together, handed it off to me with great solemnity last year during a reclamation of former childhood bedroom space. It has been sitting here in the Vermont closet ever since, never quite having made the trip back to L.A.

A funny thing happened when I pulled it out of the closet and dusted it off for this Project entry a few minutes ago: I tipped it up onto my head, expecting, as always, to be swimming in it, and -- for the very first time in my entire life -- that forty-year-old cowboy hat fit absolutely perfectly.

Sometimes you grow up.

And sometimes you grow into your own hat.

Fifty down and four hundred and fifty left to go.

ALSO:
PC 49: Millinery Lite
Tip your ten-gallon to National Hat Day
Hats off to the Stetson X Swanepoel collection