Hat Trick
Packing for our upcoming trip to Australia has been a challenge. My husband and I have a few city days in Sydney and I want to look nice, in case Time Travel gets invented while I’m there and I’m able to bounce back to the Crowded House Farewell To The World concert at the Sydney Opera House in 1996.
Plus I’m meeting my friend Kitty’s husband in person for the first time and I don’t want him to think, “THAT’S who you used to sneak over the border with to go dancing in Toronto, after you each told your parents that you were sleeping over at the other person’s house? What other poor choices are lurking in your teenage past?” (Answer: many. That’s why Kitty and I can never stop being friends.)
But after Sydney, we’re trekking for a week in Tasmania in what we’re told is highly changeable conditions – could be hot and sunny, could be cold and rainy, could be all of the above, and that’s just before lunch. More importantly, we have to carry all our gear in backpacks that our guide company provides. (If I’m honest, it wasn’t until two months after I paid our deposits that I realized no one was carrying my pack for me. I’m not so much with the fine print sometimes.)
So everything that’s going in the suitcase right now has to be as light and durable and as versatile as possible, as I cross it off the Official Packing List the guide company sent. If you were to look at my growing pile of stuff you might think “Must not match anything else in the pile” was also a requirement, but no, that’s just luck. It may make it easier to spot me from the air if I wander off – I’m sorry, go bush – in search of the elusive Tasmanian Teacake Bakery.
Most of the items make sense to me – good boots, warm socks, lots of fleece. A suggestion that we might want to bring a small hand mirror “if you wear contacts” tells me that I can probably leave the makeup bag behind, as it does not appear that I will have to see myself at all and, as the rest of the people we’re hiking with are strangers, they’re just going to have to take me as I am. (As for my husband, did I mention this whole trip is in honor of our 25th anniversary? He’s seen worse.)
Another optional item: bathers. I could Google it, I know, or ask Kitty. But I prefer the element of surprise and am going to assume that’s a bathing suit. If it’s something else, I will definitely blog about it when I’m back, to share the knowledge.
But there is one item that has me stumped: a beanie. I know what a beanie is. I think we’d probably just call it “winter hat” in America, but “beanie” is so antipodeanally awesome, let’s stick with it.
Up until early November (we booked this trip after my dad passed away last summer, when I needed something big to look forward to) I had idly been thinking that I’d pack my fleece beret from the 2002 Olympics. I bought it in Lake Placid, while on a day trip with my husband and his dad, poking around in one of the souvenir shops up there. The hat is warm, light, durable, and could double as a soup bowl in a pinch.
When I wear it I look just like Malia Obama in this picture minus, of course, everything that makes this picture EVERYTHING.
Happy President’s Day!! xM #Aspen #friends #family #fun
A post shared by Monique Lhuillier (@moniquelhuillier) on Feb 20, 2017 at 8:10am PST
But after 45 happened, I realized that wearing something so overtly red-white-blue, with its little American flags, may not be the best strategy right now. Especially if I’m visiting an allied country whose leader 45 hung up on, like a twelve year old girl whose feelings were hurt by an insulting cootie catcher. It reminded me of my friend Ted, who bought a red baseball cap last spring that said, “Make Hats Great Again” in white embroidery. Hilarious, except no one got the joke and after getting glared at wherever he went here in the Bay Area, he took it off. Not worth the satisfaction of wearing it.
Maybe, I thought, I should wear something vaguely Canadian, or Swiss. I dug out a fetching little white winter hat that would make a lousy soup dish (it’s crocheted) but otherwise fits the bill.
But then I started getting mad. Because red, white, and blue and flag symbols don’t belong just to those that support 45. In fact, I’d argue that those of us resisting his damaging policies and pronouncements are the real patriots. It’s up to us to keep reaching out to the international community to reassure them that we are fired up and fighting back. If all I do is convince eight Tasmanian hikers that an American woman who dresses like the color wheel is dug in to oppose the shenanigans in her country right now, that’s still worth doing.
That gave me an idea. I went back into the winter hat box to find one that I’d placed in there after my last visit to Rochester. It snowed one day that I wanted to go for a walk, so I reached up onto the shelf of my late dad’s closet and landed on this beauty: a knit wool cap from the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics.
My parents took us out of school to drive us from Rochester to see those Olympics; I went to see Women’s Ice Skating, my brother saw Bobsledding, and we all cheered the Women’s Grand Slalom. It was a much more parochial time, before the Olympics-Industrial-Complex started. I remember shopping in a souvenir store – maybe the same one I would hit years later with my father-in-law – right next to a couple of the female skaters I’d watched on the rink the day before. One of the security guards on the Slalom course picked me up and put me into a Snowcat with the silver medal winner when it passed by; I don’t know who was more stunned by that, her or me. Lake Placid in February 1980 felt like a snug little winter festival, with more foreign accents and better pin trading.
Dad wore this hat for years afterward, to shovel out the front walk or cross-country ski in Mendon Ponds Park. It’s warm, it’s colorful, it’s from an American-hosted Olympics at a time when we were proud to welcome the world to our shores (and to our Adirondack villages.)
You know what else happened at that Olympics?
Hey 45: do you remember which team YOU’RE on?
Related StoriesConflation NationA Load of CrapRemember When I Was a Humor Blogger?
