The Bull's Old Hat

Arthur sat on his porch swing, the worn brim of his father's fedora resting on his knee. The hat smelled of cedar chest and seventy years of gentle keeping, of tobacco and the old department store where it was purchased somewhere back in the late 1940s. His fingers traced the crease in the crown, worn smooth by his father's calloused hands.

"He was stubborn as a bull, your grandfather," Arthur's mother used to say, shaking her head with that mixture of exasperation and admiration that long marriage brings. "But that bull-headedness kept this family afloat through the Depression."

Arthur smiled at the memory. It was 1952, the summer he turned twelve, when his father had taken him to his first baseball game at Ebbets Field. The old bull had splurged on box seats behind first base, spending a week's wages to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers play. Arthur could still see his father in that hat, leaning forward with the intensity of a man who understood that some moments in a boy's life needed to be etched in gold.

The hat had tilted back when his father laughed at the vendor's jokes, straightened when he explained the mechanics of a curveball, and been grabbed triumphantly when Jackie Robinson hit a homerun that sent the crowd into such frenzy that Arthur thought the stadium might just lift off into the summer sky.

"You see, Arthur," his father had said afterward, walking home as streetlights flickered on along Brooklyn's autumn streets, "life's a lot like baseball. You get your good pitches and your bad ones. The secret is knowing which ones to swing at."

Fifty years later, Arthur understood. The bull had passed in '87, but his wisdom lived on in every compromise Arthur struck with his own wife, in every patient hour he'd spent teaching his grandson to throw a proper pitch. Now, as his eightieth summer approached, Arthur placed the hat on his own head. It was too large, slipping down over his white hair, but for a moment, he was twelve again, and somewhere between the smell of hot dog stands and the crack of a bat, his father's arm was around his shoulders, steady and strong.

The old bull was gone, but his hat remained, carrying generations of stubborn love between its brims.