Where is his hat?

If I catch a cold this winter, it won’t be Jay Miller’s fault.
It will be all my own.
Jay, as nearly everyone knows, is the patriarch of Jay County Beverage Company. He’s also one of the nicest guys you could ever know.
His roots run deep in both Dunkirk and Portland, and though he could have retired long ago, he still goes into work each day and calls on his company’s customers.
He also picks up the company’s mail, and that’s where our paths often cross.
And that’s when I get scolded.
“Where’s your hat?” Jay started asking early last fall.
I explained that — though the closet is full of them — I’m not really a hat kind of guy.
I’ll wear a cap at the ballpark or if out on the lake. And when it gets truly cold, I have a very warm wool hat which keeps my cranium toasty but makes my hair look ridiculous when I take it off.
Most of the time, though, I’m not really a hat guy.
Jay was undeterred.
“You need a hat,” he said firmly.
Now, if this were a one-time occurrence, I wouldn’t be writing this column.
But the fact is, all last fall Jay and I had the very same conversation four mornings out of five when we stopped by the post office to pick up the mail.
“Where’s your hat?”
“It’s a nice day, Jay. I don’t really need a hat.”
“You need a hat.”
If Jay arrived after I’d left the post office but was still in the neighborhood, I’d sometimes pop into the chamber of commerce office just to avoid my scolding.
But as the weeks rolled on and the weather grew chillier, there were mornings when I had to agree with Jay.
I needed a hat.
Finally, one morning back about November, we bumped into each other in the lobby just as I was emptying the post office box.
I was, as usual, hatless.
“Here,” said Jay, “wear this.”
He handed me a burgundy-colored baseball-style cap emblazoned with his beloved Budweiser logo.
“Now you have no excuse.”
(Jay, by the way, favors a jaunty grey wool cap that keeps his head warm and protects him from the weather.)
So I took the hat and put it on and wore it back to the car, where I promptly took it off.
It stayed in the car for several weeks.
If my morning trip to the post office looked as if it would intersect with Jay’s, I’d tuck the Budweiser hat into my jacket, so I could put it on at a moment’s notice.
One morning — much to the delight of Pat Jellison at the chamber of commerce office who witnessed the encounter — I started to step out of the post office just as Jay was getting out of his station wagon. Spotting him, I stepped back inside, put on my hat, then stepped back out to meet him on the steps.
“Nice hat,” said Jay.
Now that the weather has turned worse, though, I’ve pretty much surrendered.
I’m wearing a wool cap these days when it’s really cold, and I have four more caps on stand-by: The Budweiser hat, one with the newspaper’s logo on it, an Indiana Tractor hat that the Michael family gave me several years ago at the engine show, and there’s a spare in the trunk of my car.
I’m just worried that when spring arrives and things get sloppy, I’ll run into Jay at the post office and he’ll say, “Where are your galoshes?”[[In-content Ad]]