Great Hats

The best hats that parents always find are ones that fit on a child's head before they reach the age when they decide that cute isn't necessarily without risk.

A hat becomes the thing that you use to bribe someone. "If you're not good, I'll show your friends that picture." After that statement, a parent always allows a twisted grin to spread from one ear lobe to the other while eyes sparkle and a evil laugh erupts from their throat.

Yes, hats are not always a good thing, except for parents and grandparents.

It's like the green Bermuda shorts that my mother had me wear to the Fourth of July parade when I was four or five.

"Are you sure you want him to wear those?" My dad had a serious look on his face, but my mom loved those shorts.

I wasn't out of the car more than a minute before the neighborhood friend and his older brother spotted me.

"Look at those legs," the older brother squealed. My friend laughed mechanically, and then others did too. I returned to the car quickly, and I never wore them again.

Yup, like I said hats are a unique form

of punishment. As a parent, I took this

picture of Kristin when she was just old enough to stand. My dad had the same "Fourth of July" look on his face, when I showed him the picture, but this time my mother agreed.

"She's really gonna hate that picture some day." I don't remember which one--my mom or dad--said the words, but they both nodded their heads in agreement.

It doesn't, however, have to be a hat. There are any number of things that cause a similar response.

Cles hat a pair of colorful shorts he wore to Germany the first time I took him when he just finished the sixth grade. They called them clam diggers.

He drank out of a water fountain in Salzburg, and two elderly Austrian women laughed and talked about those pants.

"What did they say dad?" I told him, and the pants never returned to the mountains of Idaho. They remained in some trash bin in the classic city of Mozart's birth, and what's funny, it happened just as I took this picture too.

Regardless how much I write about this curious situation, I still am a proud grandparent, who enjoys pictures like this, so little Samantha's hat is one I will remember fondly, just like the many things I also remember about Cles and Lydia and Kristin.