41. Hats

Yep, it was C.W. I was processing some early morning photos I had taken of the Little Rock skyline when I heard his footsteps. I was at the door before he knocked, for he bangs so loudly at times that he wakes up my wife, and she manages to twist her head around another 360 degrees when she is awakened ere the appointed time.

Anyway, I opened the door and couldn’t even see C.W. for this enormous cowboy hat. I mean it must have been three feet in diameter. Underneath it, he looked a little like George W. Bush.

“Howdy partner,” he said.

“Come in and be quiet,” I said. Then I had to step aside to let the hat pass. “Take that stupid thing off,” I said.

“Jealous?” he said.

“Of what?”

“From Darwin on, your scientists have agreed that the female of the species has been attracted to large, gaudy appendages.”

“Do you think they meant to include cowboy hats?”

“It’s taught as fact in Texas.”

“A lot of things are taught as fact in Texas,” I said. “Besides, what’s it to you?”

“I’m in love,” he said.

“You’re what!”

“Well, maybe not in the strictest sense, but I am studying this thing called dating.” He paused and looked around. Then he straightened his hat and grinned. “And I have a girlfriend.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Found her down on the river.”

“What? How?” I was stupefied.

“Well, I started out in the bars, but all the girls I met there said that I would never make them wet, so I started looking for beaches down along the river.”

“In the middle of winter?”

“Yeah. I wasn’t having much luck until I found this one fishing.”

“Fishing?”

“Yeah. I worked up this ‘retrieve from the ground’ line I though was pretty good.”

 “Retrieve from the ground line?”

“Yep. Ain’t that what you call it.

“You may mean ‘pick-up line.’”

“Precisely. Want to hear it?”

I groaned.

“Here we go … I said.’Hey, I see you like to fish. Bet I could make you a fisher of men.’”

“C.W., you are whacko.”

“Hey, it worked.”

“It did?”



“Yeah, we’ve had two dates so far. But I had to dress up to make the third.”

“Dress up?”

“Yep.” He pointed to the hat.

“What’s the story?”

“Well, yesterday when I called her, she seemed hesitant.”

“Hesitant?”



From this photo he showed me,
C.W. was doing okay, for a while.



“Well, she put me off.”

“How so?”



“Well, she said she though I was about one cowboy hat shy of a rodeo.”

“Thence, the hat?”



“Yep. I bet now I can get ‘to a point across an intervening space.’”

“C.W.,” I said. “I don’t think you could ‘get over’ if you had some cattle as well as a hat.”

“You’re just jealous,” he said.