My Dad’s Winter Cap

 

My Dad’s plaid woolen cap

Watercolor sketch of my Dad’s winter cap with ear flaps

This was one of my Dad’s winter caps, complete with earflaps for warmth against the cold and windy Minnesota winters.  He had another plaid cap with sheep’s wool lining and giant ear flaps, and he looked like Elmer Fudd whenever he wore it.  But, my Dad dressed for warmth, not fashion, like most sensible people do.

I don’t think my Dad wore a corduroy cap, but this poem by Ted Kooser reminds me of Dad all the same:

New Cap
by Ted Kooser

Brown corduroy,
the earflaps tied on top,
the same size cap he bought
when he was young,
but at eighty-six
a head’s a smaller thing
the hair gone fine and thin,
less meat to the scalp,
and not so much
ambition packed inside.
He squints from under the bill
as if the world
were a long way off,
and when he tips it back
to open his face
to conversation,
it looks so loose
you think that one of them,
the cap or he,
might blow away.