About a Hat

An excerpt of Cornelia Maude Spelman's SOLACE: A memoir.

Drawing by Cornelia Maude Spelman

I had left the church where the meeting had been and was riding the city bus past the cemetery that used to be an orchard, and I thought, as I do every single time I pass that cemetery-once-an-orchard, about my daughter’s friend’s mother who was buried there. About how she must be lying, still, after all these years, in the exact same position her body had been in at the funeral when she’d been laid out for all to see, unmoving. And as I put my hand in my yellow canvas bag, the one that hangs so handily across my body so that I could just stuff things in it—a book, a scarf, gloves, a hat—I realized that my hat was not in there.

***

I had taken the hat out of the closet that morning, the first spring-like day—if you can call it spring-like when some snow was still, in places, piled in dirty clumps on the sides of the street. I had taken the hat out of the closet because the sun was so bright, and the hat had a brim just wide enough to protect my face, and my face, since I hadn’t taken enough care about it when I was young, was now prone to pre-cancer spots and I’d even had one actual cancer—easily enough removed, after all, but still. Having nearly forgotten the hat, which I’d bought only last spring, I felt happy to see it again, to be able to wear it, because it really was a perfect hat for me—lightweight, cotton, easy to stuff quickly into that yellow canvas bag or even a coat pocket, yet it protected my face, and was, though not exactly fashionable, not actually awful as a lot of hats are; as, in fact, most hats are.

As I put my hand in my yellow canvas bag, the one that hangs so handily across my body so that I could just stuff things in it—a book, a scarf, gloves, a hat—I realized that my hat was not in there.

I’d clapped it onto my head early that morning as I left our apartment to take a quick walk around the block, past the white clapboard church with the blue door and the sign reading “God is Still Speaking,” and I’d muttered, under my breath, “Well, good luck with that!”

I’d taken just a very short walk before my friend was to pick me up for the meeting we were going to, the Twelve Step meeting where I was still learning how powerless I am over other people, and often, powerless even over my own feelings, but I was also reminded that I at least have power over my own actions.

***

I’d needed to walk. My back had been aching, partly from not walking enough, and that nerve in my left thigh had been acting up, that nerve that gave me unpredictable shocks like I imagined an electric prod would feel. And I needed the hat to keep that sun, warm and lovely though it was, from my face—those spots the doctor called “pre-cancer,” like, I thought, life could be called “pre-death.”

I was happy, walking in the sun yet protected from its harmful rays, happy that it was, finally, after an unusually cold winter, and what the weather report calls a polar vortex—a period of time in which the cold and ice, instead of moving on, just stayed put, and caused the world beneath to shiver—it was finally almost spring. And for the past few years, I’d been under another kind of polar vortex, a coldness between my son and me that wouldn’t move on, and beneath which I, and I imagined that he, too, shivered.

I was happy, as I walked, that I was about to see my friend, because we always laughed about things that would, in other circumstances, make you cry, and when, as I came around the corner by my building, I saw her car at the curb, I quickened my pace. As I approached the car I could see my friend bent over her phone, texting, and I leaned down to knock on the window. She looked up and made a gesture of surprise, unlocked the door so I could get in, and we both laughed, because she’d just been texting me that she was early.

And this turned out to be the last moment when I remembered having my hat.

***

When we’d parked at the curb near the yellow brick church for the meeting, I’d had to wait for my friend to get out and then I’d had to crawl across the driver’s seat to get out myself, because there was a chunk of snow keeping the passenger door from opening. Maybe I’d dropped my hat on the pavement still covered in spots with crusty, dirty snow, and walked away, not noticing?

Later, I called the church office. The woman in the office was as nice and sympathetic as you would think someone who works in a church office would be. She took down my phone number and promptly called back to say she’d gone downstairs to the room where we’d had our meeting, and checked the stairs, but found no hat. She would keep my number and call me if anyone turned it in.

I had taken the hat out of the closet because the sun was so bright, and the hat had a brim just wide enough to protect my face, and my face, since I hadn’t taken enough care about it when I was young, was now prone to pre-cancer spots and I’d even had one actual cancer—easily enough removed, after all, but still.

Maybe, just maybe—though I didn’t think so—I’d left it in the restaurant where my friend had dropped me after the meeting but before I took the bus. I’d had a cup of tea and a bite and read my book by Anthony Trollope, the third one of his I’d read in a row. I’d hit the jackpot with Trollope, he’d written so many books—forty-seven novels!—that I’d have a lot of reading pleasure ahead. His stories of people’s relationships comforted me. There was, really, no difference at all between my own difficulties and the difficulties of people Trollope portrayed more than a hundred and fifty years ago.

There were differences, certainly, in customs between Victorian England and post-9/11 America; certainly not the same weather terms as “polar vortex,” but no difference at all in the ways people loved, sorrowed, struggled, suffered, were estranged or were dear to one another. Henry James said of Trollope that he “helped the heart of man to know itself.” (The heart of woman, too, Mr. James.) Our difficulties had always been so, were still so, and would continue to be so, if, that is, the world continued, which did not always seem likely.

Order the book…

I sometimes stopped reading the news. If only everyone really cared about each other, the worst problems could be solved. But it was sad and obvious truth that some people in the world, like me, could have enough to eat, could sleep in a warm apartment, while, elsewhere, people went hungry, or slept on the streets, or in tents in camps.

I could have a nice hat, and some people had no hat at all. I tried to even the score a little by donating money every month to certain groups doing good, but there was no way to even the score; it was blind luck that I was born into having what I had.

I called the cafe but it was closed, and there was no way to leave a message. So I could still hope that my hat might be there, though I didn’t think it was.

I decided to take another bus back to the yellow brick church where the meeting had been. I no longer had a car, hadn’t driven for more than a decade, not since we’d moved to the apartment after selling the house in which my son and daughter had grown up. We could walk to just about everything, and there were buses, cabs, and trains for anything we couldn’t walk to. I’d discovered I liked not owning a car, that it offered a freedom like that of not owning a dog that you had to walk, and clean up after, and take to the vet.

As I waited at the bus stop, a cab approached, so I hailed it, thinking it would be a faster way to get back to the church in case my hat might still be lying in the street or sidewalks near it. “I need for you to take me back to a place where I think I lost my hat,” I told the driver after I got in the cab and gave him directions.

I sometimes stopped reading the news. If only everyone really cared about each other, the worst problems could be solved. But it was sad and obvious truth that some people in the world, like me, could have enough to eat, could sleep in a warm apartment, while, elsewhere, people went hungry, or slept on the streets, or in tents in camps. I could have a nice hat, and some people had no hat at all.

He was middle-aged—at least I thought so, from what I could see of him from the back seat of the cab, and he spoke with a foreign accent. As he drove, we talked of the weather, the cold winter, the polar vortex, and he said how it was hard to drive a cab in the winter, because not only was it cold, but it was dark, and when it was dark, it was more dangerous. A cabbie had recently been shot, he told me, and another cabbie, stabbed. There were areas of the city so dangerous that he, and other drivers, too, he said, when they saw the address, were not willing to go there.

I asked why the cab didn’t have a protective wall between him and his passengers, like the cabs in New York City, but he said a lot of drivers didn’t like them because they cramped the driver’s seat, and that he never knew what car he would get, anyway, so one car might have that protection and another might not.

“Would it be at all possible for you to get another job?” I asked, aware, though, that the economy was terrible, that so many people worked for wages that would not support them, and that they could not afford or sometimes even obtain medical insurance.

“Well, not really,” he replied, “because the only job I could get is minimum wage, and then you have to work two or three jobs just to get by.”

“Oh,” I said. “Of course. I see. I’m sorry. That is hard.” There was a brief silence.

“Well,” I said, “I guess maybe we should talk about something more cheerful.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “Let’s talk about spring, and how soon where we now see snow there will be beautiful green grass. Look!” he said, pointing out a large patch of grass showing beneath melted snow. “There’s green grass already, see?”

“I do see it,” I said. “Isn’t that great! Grass!”

“My sister,” he said, “wants me to move to Arizona where she lives. And where my nieces and nephews are. I live by myself here, and I like it here, but it’s not so good to not have family—if I was sick, no one would even know, but if I was in Arizona my sister would look in on me two or three times a day. But it is so hot there.”

“Well, it is hot there,” I agreed. “But it seems like it would be really nice to be near your family.”

How I wished I could live close to my son, to my daughter, to my grandchildren, how I shared the cab driver’s wish to be cared for by family, though, of course, luckily, I had my husband, still, who does care for me; who loves me, and whom I love, though I don’t say it that way, don’t say, as I’ve heard other older women say, since many of their friends are widows, “I still have my husband.”

We arrived back at the church. “I’m just going to jump out and look up and down the street where we parked,” I said.

“Do you want me to help you look?” the cab driver asked. “Thanks, but no,” I replied. “If you don’t mind waiting just a minute, I will take a look.”

I walked as quickly as I could, careful not to slip and fall—another thing older women often talk about, the danger, to our older bones, of falling—up and down the crusty snow on the side of the street where my friend had parked. I could see that my hat was not there, was not on the edges of the shoveled walk to the church, was nowhere.

“Nope. No hat,” I said, getting back in the cab, then telling him my address.

I walked as quickly as I could, careful not to slip and fall—another thing older women often talk about, the danger, to our older bones, of falling—up and down the crusty snow on the side of the street where my friend had parked. I could see that my hat was not there, was not on the edges of the shoveled walk to the church, was nowhere. “Nope. No hat,” I said, getting back in the cab, then telling him my address.

After we had driven a few miles, the driver said, “This is a dangerous neighborhood.” We were by the high school where my son and daughter had gone, many years earlier. It was awfully hard to stop, I thought, the way a mother is expected to stop, after all the years of taking care of children, of loving them. How can a mother be expected to just stop wanting to be important to them? Such a passion, this mothering, that is forced to become a cool, detached thing. Of course I know that children grow up, live elsewhere, have lives of their own. I know that all I could expect was to be a part of their lives, but it seemed I had become such a very small part.

The neighborhood was dangerous, at times, I agreed with the cab driver. I told him it was true, there had been a shooting once, it was after my own children had graduated, luckily—a high school student had died, right on this street, right where that streetlight was. I remembered the spot distinctly, remembered driving by it when there had been flowers left there.

“That’s terrible,” he said.

We rode another mile in silence, and then the driver pulled his cab up to our apartment building. I paid the fare, and gave him what I hoped he found to be a generous tip, and got out of the cab. As I closed the door, he leaned into the open window on the curb side of the cab and said, “I hope you find your hat!”

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Excerpted from SOLACE: A Memoir by Cornelia Spelman, © 2024 by Cornelia Spelman, used with permission from JackLeg Press.