You try to hang onto a little bit of your former coolness as the years fly by, as hard a task as that is, and when a Grade 9 student asks if she can take your hat to school to show the other students, you feel kinda proud of yourself. You aren’t exactly like all the other dads and that makes you smile inside.
“Why do you want to take my hat?” you ask, just to hear her say she wants to impress her friends with her Dad’s cool choice of chapeau. But, alas, that isn’t it at all.
“It’s for history class,” she says. “We’re doing a segment on how people dressed in the forties and fifties and your hat is exactly the kind that paper boys from back then wore.”
Your mid-life crisis is long behind you (I was 46 when she was born) so this only hurts a little. But when history students are examining your wardrobe like archaeologists sifting through Tut’s tomb, it might be time for an extreme makeover.
©2011 Jim Hagarty
(Update 2023: I wrote this piece 12 years ago and since then there have been so many style changes, I can’t keep up. I often tell my family I feel like a stranger in a strange land. There is no judgment implied in that comment. Just an observation that so many things keep changing around me all the time and it is sometimes hard to absorb the new ways. But change is inevitable and I welcome it all. I have nothing but complete faith in the generations coming up behind mine, though I know some people my age don’t agree society is heading in a good direction. But for me, as the Beatles sang, “It’s getting better all the time.” To illustrate. Yesterday I was about to settle up at the dentist’s office after some surgery, when a tall young man was doing the same with another receptionist. He was in shorts and a tee shirt. Every square inch of his exposed skin, except for his face and maybe his hands, was covered in intricate tattoos. He was polite and happy and doesn’t need my approval to carry on. If he doesn’t have that, he at least doesn’t have my disapproval. Like the Beatles, I let my hair grow long for a while. That didn’t always go down well with the elders. I was mocked a few times as a girl and other times, as a hippie. I remember a tough guy in our community who made it his mission to beat up hippies. I would see him now and then in the bar where I was working as a waiter. He left me alone as I am sure having his beer brought to him on demand mattered more than whatever it might have been about me he didn’t like. It’s kind of funny how well many barkeeps are treated for that very reason. And a dozen years later, now and then, I still wear the cap that was shown in history class. Just like its owner, perhaps, it’s become a little rough around the edges.)
