Running with Scissors

Sara Peterson-Davis has worked as a newspaper researcher and reporter, as well as a communications director and consultant. She and her husband, Monty Davis, can be found in Liberty, Mo., keeping their two children from running with scissors. Contact Sara

Little Boy Blue

by Sara Peterson-Davis

It was once Yankee blue, smelled of sunshine and fresh mowed grass and had the crisp, clean look of a freshly pressed dress shirt.

Now it’s gray with a slight green patina, it smells a bit like Roquefort cheese and looks like it might have tangled with a wood chipper.

It’s the Yankees baseball cap my son, Seth, has worn on his head for the past four years. And when I say worn, I mean it’s been on his head nearly continuously for the past 1,460 days. It’s the first thing he puts on in the morning and sometimes at night it has to be gingerly removed from his sleeping head.

It has only left his head for minor surgery, church and school. Frankly, we have gotten so used to seeing it on his head that both my husband and I haven’t recognized him without it.

One afternoon last year I picked him up early from school. As I was waiting by the office I saw a couple of boys walking down the hall. Looking at the blonde-haired boy coming towards me, I thought to myself, “What a nice looking kid.” A split second later I realized, “What a minute! That’s my kid!”

While he’s been teased and cajoled about his Yankees cap, given half a dozen others to replace it and even bribed to send it somewhere to die a peaceful, dignified death, Seth usually just smiles, laughs a little and politely declines.

It would be easy for my husband and I to put our feet down and tell Seth to quit being stubborn and give up that ratty hat. But while stubbornness does play its part, we know the hat is more than just a cover for our son’s head.

It’s the canary in the coalmine that helps Seth test and navigate the social atmosphere of adolescence.

For starters, it’s a talker. Anyone with a hat like that must be a baseball fan. And over the years, people – Yankee lovers and haters - have come out of nowhere to talk baseball with Seth. That has made him plenty of baseball friends and friendly baseball enemies.

Instinctively people seem to know that a guy with a hat like that must be friendly, approachable. For Seth, if you like his ha, you’re cool. If you don’t like his hat and you want to good-naturedly tease him about it, that’s O.K. too.

Girls like a guy in a hat. But a hat that ugly is a chick magnet. Girls can’t help but tease Seth about his hat. That leads to them swiping it off his head. Which turns into a game of chase. And, well, you get the picture.

It drives one girl in particular absolutely nuts. Seth’s little sister hates that hat. And when you can annoy your little sister nearly every minute of the day simply by wearing a grubby old hat, it makes it even more important to keep it on your head.

But best of all, that hat seems to symbolize what makes Seth, well, uniquely Seth. It’s the outward sign of his need to be his own person, not follow the crowd and sometimes swim upstream. Like every kid his age he struggles with fitting in, but that hat seems to be his way of saying he’ll only go so far before he has to go his own direction again.

And for that reason, his dad and I don’t say much about him wearing a cruddy old hat.

But, the smell. That’s a different issue, altogether.

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