I LOVE HATS! I enjoy wearing them and they are awesome…but there are a few draw backs to wearing them, as I recently found out.
Now, first of all let me tell you that in Florida, hats are an essential component to any wardrobe. They act as sunbonnets to keep the suns rays off you and they are a shield of protection in the rain. The rain hits hard and fast and I have experienced being totally drenched in less than 15 seconds. (REALLY…it began raining when I was at the gas station and I had just opened the gas tank on the truck and put the gas nozzle in the tank and by the time that I got BACK in the front of the cab…less than 15 seconds…I was completely drenched. Even my shoes were completely filled with water.) It doesn’t rain here. Instead, water drops from the sky in very large sheets or buckets. It is like having a fire hydrant from the sky opened up on you. So, you can see that if you have a hat, it will at least let you go about your business without looking like a drowned possum or armadillo…of course, the armadillos fare better in the rain than the possum. My mother considers a possum to be a large rodent of unusual size…or an oversized rat. They look quite drenched when it rains.
So, now that I have explained WHY a hat is such an important part of the Florida wardrobe, I need to explain WHY I have TROUBLE with some hats…
I was at the hospital the other day helping our youngest daughter after surgery. They had released her a few days before and she was having difficulty walking. (I will save that one for another blog.) The doctor warned that it would take several days for the anesthetic to leave her system and so I helped her to the front door and had her sit in a chair and wait for me to go and get the car in the parking lot. I ran across the parking lot because it was starting to rain (see the above concern about rain in Florida) and as I got to the opening of the parking area, I thought I could cut across the front of the drive thru. My head was down; looking at the ground and my hat was obstructing my view somewhat.
Suddenly, I got slugged in the face…literally…and the following events happened pretty much simultaneously. My glasses went flying off my face (not a good sign because I am completely blind without them); my purse (my oldest daughter describes it as a bowling ball weapon because of the large size and weight) that was previously balancing on my right shoulder slipped to my elbow and began beating me up on the right side as it swung back and forth because of the jerky movements that I was making to try to fight off my attacker. Now at this point, I need to explain that my attacker was a heavy metal parking arm that happened to be dropping across the driveway. I had not seen it because I was wearing a hat (is it fair to blame an inanimate object for something like this?)
Meanwhile, my arms are flying around trying to beat off the metal arm because I have not really realized at this point what or who my attacker is. It was panic city as I tried to beat off the arm, which was relentless…; it just kept hitting me until I had the sense to move out of its way.
My head was pounding, and I mean pounding. I haven’t ever had a black eye in my life, that I remember, but I guess I couldn’t go through life without having at least earned one of them. I could tell this one was going to be a big one! I earned it though. My face began swelling immediately and the pain was horrendous. When I finally moved out of the way, found my glasses, got my bowling ball purse to stop swinging, set my hat back in place because it has been turned sideways by the metal arm during my struggle to defend myself, and took a deep breathe, I looked around and hoped that no one had seen the event. I began applying direct pressure to the side of my face in hopes that it wouldn’t bruise too much…which I was pretty sure was a senseless gesture because of the amount of pain I was experiencing. I kept looking around to see if anyone had noticed my little drama…no, make that comedy…and then the first thing that popped into my mind was YOU TUBE. I could picture in my mind the security guard that would be laughing hilariously when he saw my little boxing match with the metal arm, of which the arm won. Total knock out in less than 30 seconds.
My head was still spinning as I got into the convertible and started it up. I was so grateful that I had a cold water bottle in the car. It immediately became my cold press as I held it to my head in hopes that my face wouldn’t turn purple. Now, although one of my favorite colors is purple, I am here to tell you that I don’t wear it well on my face. It is difficult to tell people what happened. After finding out that I am ok, they do all they can not to roll on the floor laughing. Even the eye doctor asked me what I had done when I saw him two days later as I took our daughter back for a post op exam. You would have thought it was ME that had the surgery! When I explained that I had been hit by the parking garage arm, he didn’t even hold back the snicker as he told me in his English accent that I “raally needed to wotch owt for those a’ms. Tha carry quite a whollup.”
In all honesty, it is one of the most embarrassing events of my life. I also decided that because I am the only one that was there, it is only fitting that I am the one to write the blog about it. I can imagine what my darling oldest daughter, Angela the author; can come up with to tell this story. She literally keeps notes on my crazy life and uses it as fodder for her books. In my defense, you just know that for the majority of the escapades in her books, she exaggerates them to the extreme…well, most of the time.
I am grateful that I have a sense of humor and have the ability to laugh at myself. This little experience ranks right up there with falling face first on the sidewalk at Rick’s College when I was on a date at a formal dance and I was trying to impress my date. Needless to say I never dated HIM again and that I hemmed up the formal that I had tripped over. Oh, it could also rank up there with the time that I was trying to impress Craig’s former missionary companion and ran down the snowy hill when we were on a double date. I fell head first (I know, there is a pattern here) and when my Knight in Shining Armor (Craig) finally reached me to rescue me, the damage was already done. I had broken my collar bone and I still had eight bridesmaid’s dresses and a wedding dress to make while I was nurturing the collar bone back to health. It was healed before the wedding three months later, but it was pretty painful and not too easy to explain. Pretty embarrassing to have your fiancé take you to the emergency room and explain to your mother what we were doing that could break my collarbone. Good thing my Mom knew long ago that somehow I missed the line when the Lord handed out balance and coordination. When we told her I tripped, slid on the snow, and rolled down the hill, she understood completely.
Now having said all of this, when you get discouraged or down and you need a laugh, you can picture me having a boxing match with the metal arm in the parking garage while my purse is swinging to and fro from my elbow and hitting me in the side while my left arm is giving a left punch to the parking garage arm that is relentlessly hitting me. It was hilarious…I just hope that it never ends up on YOU TUBE. It is not something I would want to go down in history for.
