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Hats

Sometimes stuff just happens.  My favorite hat is a black drivers hat that I wear most of the time in the winter.  I wore it on this trip.  I should say I wore it at the start of this trip.  Somehow I lost it on the plane between Minneapolis and Washington.  I may have left it in the pocket on the back of the seat in front of me.
     When we got to Gettysburg I decided to get a new hat.  We went to Walmart and I picked out a black hat.  It was not a driver's hat but it would do.  It actually looks like a SWAT team cap or a black army ranger cap.  I will count it as my souvenir from Gettysburg. (I also bought a model of a mortar since I was a mortarman when I was in the army)
     When we got to Washington David started to pester me to get a drivers hat like the one I lost.  There are hat stores here and I am sure I could buy one for a hundred bucks or so.  But cheapskate that I am, my five dollar Walmart special will have to do.
     Today David and I were walking down the sidewalk between the Air and Space Museum and the National Art Museum.  I looked down and there was a gray hat, a beret.  David told me to put it on, so I did.  He said it looked good, but I was not so sure.  I put it in my coat pocket and donned my black ranger cap.
          On the way back to our motel we were waiting at a bus stop.  I tried out the hat again.  This time I put it on over my black cap.  David said I looked cool.  I had him take a picture of me with my camera.  I thought I looked like a 1970s pimp.  There was a young Black woman sharing the bus stop with us.  She was making every effort to ignore us.  I showed her the hat and asked her if it was a man's hat or a woman's hat.  She said that most of the time a beret is worn by a woman, but she had known some men who wore them.  "Yes," I thought, "but what kind of men?".  I put the hat back into my pocket.  Later as David and I got off the bus I said to her, "Thanks for the advice on the hat."  She did not even look up from her phone.  "No problem."

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