Officially click baited. Read more to find out how.
Recently I’ve been thinking about the future. My cousin was talking to me about her life in LA, and I was thinking about life in Brooklyn and then in New England.
One of my goals after college is to move to a small town in the northeast and work at the town bar for a bit. I’m not set on the town bar; in fact, I only decided that while writing the last sentence, but I think it would be a good way to showcase my shining personality to as many people as possible.
Last year in my English class, we read Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, a book spanning multiple generations of a single family. Basically, it’s about the ties that linger throughout families, generational trauma, and the effects of life events decades or centuries later. Gyasi talked a lot about how even though some of the family members written about hadn’t so much as existed on earth at the same time, they had undeniable similarities and connections. A few books I’ve read recently have had this theme, actually - and I can’t help but wonder in what ways it’s true for me.
Part of me thinks that when I make the move to this New Englandish town, the connection between me and past generations will intensify. Who knows what could happen? Maybe I’ll suddenly grow fond of tennis, make an impulse purchase at LL Bean, or decide to start churning my own butter. (Did my family ever do that? They must have).
Either way, I’ve been thinking a lot about family in general. Maybe this is because I recently learned I’m the product of incest thanks to my aunt’s genealogy knowledge (my parents are tenth cousins). I’m still waiting to learn how close I am to the one and only Joe Biden. Just you guys wait - I’m gonna find a way to bring it up in almost any conversation.
If you’re still reeling from the shock of this information bomb I just dropped, I understand. It took me a little bit to adjust too. If a lot of things about my sister and I started making sense for you, you’re not alone.
Please feel free to take a step back from this post and think.
But back to my original topic. For years now, every few months, I become crushingly depressed thinking about a trade or something similar that is disappearing. In senior year, there were a few weeks when I decided my future held one thing: taking the dying field of cobbling on my shoulders and dragging it across the sea to sweet salvation. This dream faded quickly as I looked up the average annual salary, and it was around 20,000. Also, once the novelty wore off, I realized I had little to no interest in repairing shoes and whatever else a cobbler does.
Last year, during a more troubling time in my life, I wanted to learn how to taxidermy. I’ve, for the most part, moved on, even though I secretly still harbor a desire to learn. Plus, my future house will ideally have a taxidermied animal inside it, if not mainly to freak out my guests.
Anyways, what I mean to say with all this is with all the contemplation on the generations that brought me here, I was thinking about who these people might have been and, more interestingly - what they might have worn.
Hats have always mystified me. They never seem to look right, but I am drawn to them. Because of this, a time when most men didn’t leave the house without a hat on seems outlandish.
Everybody had a hat that they loved enough to wear every day? Did these men feel naked when they, for some reason, had to leave their houses without them, self-conscious of their hatless heads? On a windy day, were lonely hats flying in the wind, free from the shackles of the balding heads they were used to? When did people stop wearing hats, and why?
For women too, what happened to the intricate hats with plastic or glass grapes on top, weird mesh layers, and flowers in every color you could dream of?
It could also be true that they only really wore so many hats in movies; I didn’t put much research into this.
There are so many hats in the world that get cast aside. I wonder how the bowler hats feel, sitting in some vintage store, gathering dust. Those poor hats, having done nothing wrong. Plus, the hipsters who dare to defy the times and wear them out get hated on, bullied even!! The nerve.
I would love to see more hats: pillbox hats, straw hats, boat hats, fedoras. I would also like to offer my official professional condolences to any of my followers who have been made to feel small while wearing a hat, either recently or in the past. I know one or two of you wore a fedora in elementary school, and I can only imagine what you went through.
Hats off to you, my readers
Violet
(Get it??? Because I was talking about hats, and hats off is a common phrase. It’s funny because I used a phrase that doesn’t always involve people taking their hats off in a conversation about hats. And that’s funny because, basically
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