I'm Going to Buy You a Hat

I am chased from an Irish pub by a barman with tears in his eyes and a burly-man accent.

I took the

Tom Fish

“Speedy Boarding Questionnaire” for die-hard travelers. Here’s question numéro quatro. (My full questionnaire responses linked at bottom. My first response after the link is a major downer, but after that you’re home free.)

Tom’s question for my response below:

“Great news! I'm going to buy you a hat. The catch is that you have to wear this hat on every future travel trip at all times.

What kind of hat would you like?”

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I would like a red beret. 

I would like to be the old, wiry, oak-solid guy who’s up early walking the hillsides in Donegal, strong and confident, monosyllabic, the guy who pokes a big knobbly staff into the rocky ground and irritably pries at things, the guy that settles down in the pub, sets his red beret smack in the center of the table, glowers over his pint, and dares anyone in the room to touch it. 

My last name would be O’Meara. 

If I liked you, and I wouldn’t, I would show you the soft, worn fabric inside my hat. There’d be a picture of an angry Chinese tiger there with one mighty claw extended. 

Beneath an elastic strap, I’d keep a ragged-edge sepia photo of a girl that I loved during the war. Which war was doesn’t matter. “The” war. On the back of the sepia photo would be two hand-scribbled lines from Yeats you could barely make out because of the faded ink. They’d be the lines the girl from the war wrote me before she died from tuberculosis. Which lines don’t matter. You’re getting hung up on the wrong details. 

When I die, they will hang the red beret that you purchased for me on a bronze hook behind the barman. If you inquire about the red beret, the barman will pretend he didn’t hear you. If you ask him again because you thought you didn’t ask loudly enough, he will rage with hurt and anger that, “You’ll never understand the man who wore that red beret!”

He will shout at you in a strong, burly-man accent. “He was a great man,” he’ll yell, the tears swelling in his eyes, “and you don’t need to go poking about things you’ll never understand. Drink up and get out! Out!”

That’s the hat I want.

This is the cottage where I lived alone on mussels and mead. Thank you Annie Spratt of Unsplash for daring to approach within buckshot range.