I rarely wore a hat when I was younger. Yes, in the colder months, I’d wear a knit cap on my head to keep my head warm. And I’d also don a baseball cap to shield my eyes from the sun during the summer months.

When I was in the army, I had to wear two different hats. The garrison cap was worn with fatigues and the dress service cap when wearing a dress uniform.

But as soon as I got out of the army in the early 70s, I grew my thick, wavy, brown hair relatively long, and I basically stopped wearing hats at all. Period.

When I was in my early 50s, I went through a straw fedora hat (like the one pictured above) phase for a couple of reasons. First, I spent a lot of time outdoors and as my hair was starting to thin out, my dermatologist encouraged me to always wear a hat to protect my head from the damaging rays of the sun. Second, I thought I looked cool in them.

My straw fedora hat phase ended about a decade ago when I noticed that most of the men wearing straw fedora hats were older men. And even though I, too, had become an older man, I no longer felt like wearing a straw fedora hat made me look cool anymore.

(Just an observation about men’s hats. Did you ever notice that in older movies (say from the forties and fifties), almost all of the men in those movies wore hats? Mostly fedora hats? These days, about the only man I know of who still wears a fedora hat is Raymond Reddington.)

After having had a cancerous growth removed from my forehead, and having lost most of my hair, I decided that I still needed to wear a hat when outside, but as I’m no longer into straw fedora hats, I have started wearing baseball caps again.

These days, I have about half a dozen baseball caps to choose from and I never go outside without one of them on. Well, that’s not entirely true. When I go for a ride on my ebike, I have a special cycling cap that I wear.

I wear it under my bicycle helmet and because it has a small brim on it, it keeps the sun out of my eyes while cycling.

By the way, if you found this post to be a bit boring, don’t blame me. Blame Linda G. Hill for her Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt, where she asked us to write a post using the word “hat” in it.