My daughter took this shot of me and my chapeau a few minutes before she disappeared in the distance on Park Avenue in Utah’s Arches National Park. She is one of three daughters that I claim, the middle one in terms of actuarial longevity, the one that lives, loves, photographs, plans, plants, reaps, parties and publishes and otherwise stagnates in Virginia while she could be living in The Great State of Texas—not, of course, that I ever bring that up in discussions—never have and never will, neither vocally nor in written discourse. She posted the photo below on her blog and I commented on the posting—my comment is reproduced below. Click here to view her original posting. When you get there you’ll find this photo:
As one can see, I cropped the photo as originally posted—I was a bit uncomfortable with that gull hanging around overhead, and that cloud could have contained rain, a condition beneficial neither to a straw hat nor to its wearer, hence the cropping.
This is my original comment on her posting, a comment that she used as the subject for a revisit to her original post.
I have been very remiss in not commenting on this posting and I extend my apologies! Obviously I’ve been very busy—too busy to acknowledge the photographic expertise reflected in these photos, particularly in the shot of that handsome chapeau sported by the handsome dude seated directly below said hat.
How I loved that hat! I remember chasing it in Arizona when an unkindly wind removed it from its wearer and sent it rolling and tumbling toward Canyon de Chelly with its wearer in hot pursuit. Had providence not placed a small bush a few feet from the precipice of the canyon, I may have followed that hat to the canyon’s floor, a sheer drop of 600 feet. However, thanks to providence, the hat’s forward progress was stopped by a strategically placed bit of flora, an indigenous plant equipped with thorny branches that stopped my hat in its race and in its tracks—and me in mine. No, I did not run into the bush—I wisely skidded to a stop when I saw the bush reach out and capture my hat.
That hat and I were inseparable for several more years, but one day it became conspicuous by its absence—it had mysteriously disappeared without leaving the slightest hint of how, when, where or why it left me.
I suspect that my hat felt—even though it was a straw hat rather than a felt hat—from the beginning of that windy day at Canyon de Chelly that its future was inextricably intertwined with the canyon floor, that because of its lightness and its ability to drift with the wind, it would wind up undamaged by the 600 foot drop, and would ultimately live a long life, squared securely atop the head of a person of the four-state region, either New Mexico, Arizona, Utah or Colorado, possibly a direct descendant of the greatest chief in Navajo history, or one of the Apache tribes, Geronimo or Chief Sitting Bull or another of the native American Indians immortalized in literature and movies and television, and still living in the tales told by the most respected elders of various tribes in the great Southwest. Tales of their exploits are also told in the great state of Texas, fantastic recitals that dance—precipitously, so to speak—on the rim of the unbelievable.
Please accept my abject apologies for my failure to respond sooner. I would also be remiss if, driven by my use of the word sooner, I failed to say that the word sooner reminds me that there are also many tall tales told in the great state of Oklahoma.
So now I do so say.
