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PrintMy Puerto Rican hat: a love affair
I haven't actually seen the squirrels eating it, knocking over the flamingos and leaving the hat several feet away from the Buddha, but... where there's smoke, there are squirrels.
Do squirrels eat hats?
As in Latin-American-type straw hats with black or blue ribbons. As in my hat. The one I’m wearing in the photo on this page.
Since my love affair with Puerto Rico started more than a decade ago, I’ve been buying and wearing these Panama-type jobbies. At first, they were the larger kind of Panamas. But one day, while hanging around old San Juan, a Puerto Rican theater group of about 15 or so performers came bursting out of their rehearsal space, each person dressed from a particular period in the island’s history. The one I kept looking at turned out to be the alleged modern gangster character, a slender Puerto Rican dude in an electric-green untucked shirt with a pencil-thin mustache who probably could do a mean Ricardo Montalban impersonation.
But it was the hat that really caught the eye of this cat.
I didn’t know why at first. I soon realized, however, what was so different about it: The stylish thing was smaller than everybody else’s Panama I’d seen on the island. I just knew I had to have one, immediately. So after their brief and highly entertaining street performance, I found a hat shop. I was set after handing over $25 and dealing with two giggly Puerto Rican ladies (they’d been making jokes in Spanish about this mainland gringo looking for such a hat, but I certainly didn’t mind).
I was still standing in the doorway when an American woman complimented me on it—with her husband in tow, no less. A few hours later, as I walked down San Juan’s main drag along the ocean, a car full of Puerto Ricans stopped at the light and told me how much they liked my new brim. During the course of the conversation, they said no one wore that style of hat in Puerto Rico anymore. Or almost no one.
“Only men who hang around racetracks,” said one girl. Oh, man, dream come true. I was a Puerto Rican imitation tough guy. Too funny.
That was about 10 years ago and I’ve been wearing them ever since. Except recently. A rainstorm destroyed my current and only hat as I rode my bicycle home in one of our summer’s many and sudden humidity-laden torrential downpours. By the time I got home, it was looking like a potato sack. I let it dry overnight, but no go. The next morning it was obvious: The hat couldn’t be worn with any more fake Puerto Rican gangster-wannabe enthusiasm.
But there was no way I’d just get rid of it. So I placed it on a heavy stone Buddha I have in my backyard, flanked by two pink flamingos. For some reason, it seemed so fitting.
Except a few days later, the flamingos were knocked over and the hat was several feet away. Strong winds, I thought, as I put the shrine to my hat back together.
The situation repeated itself a few days later. Again and again. And there was a burgeoning hole in the front of the hat, and a quite ragged one at that. Then it dawned on me: Were squirrels eating it?
Now, I haven’t actually seen the squirrels eating it, knocking over the flamingos and leaving the hat several feet away from the Buddha, but . . . where there’s smoke, there are squirrels.
The hat looks like heck. Buddha doesn’t mind. The flamingos still stand guard futilely. And my wonderful hat that served my fantasy-prone mind gets smaller by the week.
What kind of self-respecting Puerto Rican gangster would put up with this? And I never did go to the racetrack.
