The Hat By Jamie Kirkpatrick

For three hundred and sixty-four days every year (three hundred and sixty-five in a leap year), the hat hibernates (and estivates) in the gloomy nether regions on the top shelf of my closet. It only comes out on that one day when all of us are some shade of green, You know the day I’m talking about…

But first, a little history. “Kirk” is the Scottish word for church, so my surname literally means “Patrick’s church.” But my family is of the Protestant persuasion, so when it came time for one of my distant grandfathers to emigrate from Scotland in the early half of the 18th Century, it’s highly likely that his family spent a generation or two in Ulster, Ireland’s northern-most province before finally arriving in America. We know they eventually made it here safely because there is an account in the annals of Butler County, Pennsylvania, describing how my seven-times-great grandfather, whose name just happened to be James Kirkpatrick, was the last settler in Western Pennsylvania to be attacked by Indians. (He obviously survived that attack or I wouldn’t be writing this.) But my point here is that we—the Kirkpatricks—are likely a subset of Scottish immigrants to America known as the Scots-Irish. In other words, we’re a little bit of both cultures, Scottish and Irish.

Now, back to the hat. In 2008, I was the lucky recipient of a three months-long teaching fellowship at St. Andrews University in Scotland. The unlucky part of that is that my three months happened to be January, February, and March, not the most desirable time of year to be living hard by the North Sea. My four room flat was on the ground floor of a large stone house overlooking St. Andrews Bay, and the gales that swept into town would, I swear, shake the house hard enough to wake me up on dark winter mornings…

Where was I? Oh, the hat! So on that day in March—you know the one I’m talking about—I took myself over to my local, The Central, to have a wee dram to warm my cold bones. Well, while I was there, I noticed the hat behind the bar. I inquired about it and the publican told me that if I bought four pints of Guinness, I could have the hat for free. That sounded like a good deal to me, except that I was not about to drink four pints of that dark and creamy mother’s milk. Then I noticed there were four red-robed university students sitting at a table behind me, each nursing (as university students are wont to do) a pint of Guinness.

“Gentlemen,” says I, “in honor of Blessed St. Patrick, “let me buy each of you another pint of Guinness.” To make this long story just a bit shorter, they agreed, so they got the Guinness and I got the hat.

That was (shudder!) seventeen years ago and I still have the hat. As I previously mentioned, it usually sleeps at the top of my closet and only appears once a year. Over those years, it has been worn by Herself, several friends, and, as you can tell by the picture that accompanies this Musing, it is now a favorite of the grandkids. Such are my memories of the hat—well worth four pints, don’t you think?

Slainte!

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. His most recent novel, “The Tales of Bismuth; Dispatches from Palestine, 1945-1948” explores the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is available on Amazon and in local bookstores.