My New Baseball Cap

My new baseball cap. A while back, while traveling, I lost my favorite baseball cap, a red Kreuz cap from Lockhart, Texas. (It currently resides somewhere out back on the family farm in Virginia.) Tragic. Sarah quickly found me a viable replacement (I'm picky), a Yeti coolers hat from a fish and tackle shop in Maryland. (I absolutely have to have a good baseball cap on a road trip.) Then recently, I lost that hat somewhere around the house. (Why do I keep losing them? Will it eventually turn up?) Now I've got a new new one, a Callahan's General Store hat, from Austin, Texas (purchased recently on yet another road trip). It's currently getting settled in, broken in.¹ I like it.

1 For me, a newly purchased baseball cap is just a starting point. It must be rigorously molded and stressed: extensive bending and shaping of the brim,^a steady wear until it softens and conforms. Until it sits just right, natural-like.

a There are two primary brim styles today:

1. Conventional (bent): Traditionally, folks bend the cap brim to some degree, increasing eye-protection.

1. Hip-hop (flat): This is a common youthful style, the brim flat, as if straight from the store.

Like most of my generation, I choose the former. But conventional/bent is a spectrum, and in my rural upbringing, the tendency was towards heavily bent brims, a markedly rounded arc, and I myself continue to favor this style today (though I am less extreme than the country boy I saw at the airport the other day, who's brim was bent in a sharp inverted U, almost to the point of folded in half).