Every second Sunday the man in the hat put his pants on backwards chose a hat and went about his day. If it was a particularly cold day, say a mid October day or an early November day, he wore corduroy, a wide serge in beige or light brown. If it was a warm day, say late June or early July, he wore a light linen or a loose weave, white or glass-blue. For a hat he chose a Tartu Flat Cap or a pointy fedora. Every third Sunday, or the fourth, depending on the weather, he wore a tin miner’s cap with a larger than average brim and the letters MJP embossed on the front piece. He kept his coalman’s hat for Saturdays and the odd Friday, or whenever he felt like wearing a hat without embossing. When he was a wee lad he would steal his mother’s church-bonnet, the one with flowers and her offering-card stuck in it, and wear it in secret behind the house where he lit matches against the tool-shed hasps.
The buzzing flushes the thoughts in his head like a hive of bees, the hat serving no other purpose than to collect the honey and nattering in his head. On such days, days when the outside invades the inside, he dons an earflapped winter toque with a giant C stitched into the front. By pulling it down over his ears, then cinching the taut-string round his chin, he could deafen the buzzing to a soft humming drone. The buzzing took him back to a hot August day behind the Presbyterian Church catching bees in peanut-butter jars, the captured bees buzzing and flittering in glass pokies. The man in the hat’s mother bought him a penknife for his tenth birthday, a red-handled Swiss Army knife with a corkscrew and an ivory toothpick. He used the largest of the blades to scrape the inside of the peanut-butter jar and the ivory toothpick to stab at the bees’ with. When he was in grade five a classmate named Scrims speared a moth with the point of his compass and ate it, the wings flittering madly between his teeth.
The buzzing flushes the thoughts in his head like a hive of bees, the hat serving no other purpose than to collect the honey and nattering in his head. On such days, days when the outside invades the inside, he dons an earflapped winter toque with a giant C stitched into the front. By pulling it down over his ears, then cinching the taut-string round his chin, he could deafen the buzzing to a soft humming drone. The buzzing took him back to a hot August day behind the Presbyterian Church catching bees in peanut-butter jars, the captured bees buzzing and flittering in glass pokies. The man in the hat’s mother bought him a penknife for his tenth birthday, a red-handled Swiss Army knife with a corkscrew and an ivory toothpick. He used the largest of the blades to scrape the inside of the peanut-butter jar and the ivory toothpick to stab at the bees’ with. When he was in grade five a classmate named Scrims speared a moth with the point of his compass and ate it, the wings flittering madly between his teeth.
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