Packing tip: if you are traveling with large hats, don’t pack them, wear them.
Wouldn’t it be dreamy if people started wearing large hats while traveling? Out with sweatpants and messy buns… in with large hats and beautiful travel attire!
Whenever I enter a hat shop while traveling, my fantasy world kicks into overdrive, and with each one I try on, I become different characters dropped into fantastic worlds.
I inevitably fall in love with the biggest, most ornate ones, and I’m overcome with that feeling of “My life will not be complete without you, oh darling hat!”
I silence the stern voice in my head that says, “Marci, how are you going to carry this? You are backpacking, riding buses, and staying in hostels. How will you afford… muffle muffle muffle…” (the sounds of me covering that voice with my hand and wrestling it back into its drab hatless world.)
I emerge from all hat shops giddy and exuberant with my fantasy on my head. In Scotland in 1996, I bought a hat so large (it made me feel like I was in the Sally Tomato scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s) that I couldn’t see in any direction except low things in front of me. A cute boy at a coffee shop said in his singsong Scottish accent, “Aye I see we’ve got a lampshade in our head.” At least I think he was cute and I think he was talking to me – I couldn’t really see him.
People on the street thought I was running the ghost tours because of my hat paired with the large velvet cape I couldn’t resist in London. I had to wear the damn hat (and cape) until I eventually found a massive hatbox, then it had to sit in my lap or on an empty seat next to me.
And here I am, thirty years later, still delighted when I come across my hat from Rosie’s hat shop on Candlemakers Row in Edinburgh.
The silver hat called out to me from a hat shop in Venice or Florence in the year 2000. Made of sculpted straw, perfect for a stroll on the beach during Victorian times, or walking in the lake region with a few poets named Wordsworth and Keats. No I couldn’t pack it. Yes I had to wear it everywhere-on buses, trains, and my flight home.
I’ve included a few of my fantasy hat purchases over the years for your entertainment, and you will notice that I have even, on occasion, gotten my children and niece to cooperate and join me in my hat extravaganzas while traveling. (They DID protest helping carry the hatboxes.)
The golden hat that swirls up to the sky in one photo I bought last week at a vintage shop called Bananas. It raised it’s golden gorgeousness at me when I walked by, and I thought, “Oh look are you! I will find somewhere to wear you!” And I did! I wore it o my book signing when I needed a dash of drama on my head.
One of my favorite hat experiences was my Kraken hat. I have been deeply grieving for a while now, and I was putting together an outfit for a museum in Salem, MA that specializes in Maritime and Ships. My daughter was singing for their gala. I was on a mission to find a hat shaped like a ship, because the last one I bought I gave away on a whim, foolish me. I’m always giving away my favorite things for some reason. Maybe making room for a better one? I came across a milliner in London called Pearls and Swine and she had this cheeky hat of a kraken taking down a ship AS A HAT!! I love cheek and humorous attire, so I immediately fell in love. I also have a special connection to krakens, as my son was fascinated by them when he was little, so we had many discussions on whether krakens actually existed.
I also connected to the kraken hat because it was taking down a large ship, and it seemed an allegory for my life–that I was sailing along smooth waters when a massive kraken called “Loss” took down me and everything I loved. With the loss of my father, my marriage, my best friend, my Mom…. seeing my kids in so much pain… well the giant kraken took me down.
However, the hat had a name. It was called “Awakening.” I had to really think about this. Why would someone name a hat “Awakening” when it actually the opposite of that, it was complete and utter destruction. That’s when I thought about Joseph Campbell’s quotes: “The greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.” Superheroes don’t become superheroes because life runs smoothly. Their strength grows more powerful by defeating a villain of equal power. They are forced to rise. Ancient stories and mythology teach us that the world will burn everything down, take everything we love, cause soul searing pain over and over, and what does this teach us? That perhaps “we are capable of far greater things than we know.”
Maybe I’m thinking too much and too philosophically about a mere kraken hat. I don’t know, but I decided to wear the paradoxical hat to the museum event, and it seemed perfect, surrounded by maritime art that was thousands of years old, all of it witness to stories of love and loss, strength and weakness, the entire grand pageant of life.
And now, witness to one more human in the year 2019, me, a broken-hearted lost human who didn’t know how I was going to survive the devastation, I only knew I must to show my children how to rise.
If I really think about it now, I guess I have gone through an awakening, an awakening of life’s fragility, an awakening of finding the magic amongst the jagged edges of my grief, an awakening of dancing when I feel like sobbing. .
So now that I’m older, have I stopped buying oversized impractical hats? I’m going to leave that a mystery for you… because I love a mystery, and even more, I love a mysterious hat.
