My constantly vanishing favorite hat.

I always lose my favorite stuff. Somehow I have misplaced my favorite baseball cap. I lost it for over a year when I went under the deck while wearing it to work on some plumbing in the crawl space. I found it a few weeks ago when I was under the deck to bring out the hammocks for summer and it just happened to catch my eye. As of yesterday it is missing again. I think I wore it to LACMA when we went to see the Barbara Kruger show (which is amazing, btw, if you’re a fan of Barbara Kruger). So now I’m wearing my second favorite hat.

If you see this hat, call me. This is not me wearing the hat. This is a model on the Veilance website. I’ve always been a fan of a technical fabric. A friend of mine told me that my style of dress is something he calls “Eurocop.” Which makes total sense. I thought of it more as “space station employee” but I’m cool with “Eurocop.” After we left the Barbara Kruger show we walked over to look at the Alexander McQueen exhibition. Fashion and costume in a museum is always interesting and in this case they did a really good job of pairing his work with paintings and antique clothes from the 16th and 19th centuries. He was a pretty genius designer. Which then got me to thinking about how he died by suicide in his early 40’s. If I remember correctly his mother had died and it drove him to some dark place. I have to assume he’d been suffering from depression for a long time and that this was the catalyst.

Last night we went to our friends house for dinner. They live NE of Los Angeles in an older suburb with giant houses behind high walls. They’re one of those couples where you’re like, “oh come on!” What I mean is she’s a former model who grew up a coal miner’s daughter (for real) in Tennessee and after making a fortune she pivoted to painting in her 30’s. We have a few of her paintings, given to us as gifts — one of which was featured in a story about her in the New York Times. (Right?) She always looks amazing, the former model part, duh. But then she’s also a fantastic painter and every time we visit we get to see her works in progress. He’s the president of an international gallery so every time we see him he’s either just back from, or on his way off to, someplace amazing. When we hang out I get to practice my German with him since it’s his native language. But what was really stealing his attention last night is his teenage daughter had a gentleman caller over for dinner last night and it was a first. I didn’t fully understand why he was so preoccupied but then it dawned on me — he’s not worried that his daughter is going to get pregnant, he’s anxious for her because this might be her first boyfriend. Her first kiss. Her first romance? It’s that excited anxiety. I can’t imagine how that must feel, to have a child and be so caught up in their lives that this moment would mean almost as much to you as it does to them. It was very sweet.

We’re probably on the verge of locking everything down again. UCLA has gone back to masks for indoor classes. The COVID numbers are spiking again. Exhausting. I just kind of have accepted that masks in groceries and masks when I teach in person indoors are the way it’s going to be. There are worse things but I need to find some sort of anti fogging coating for my glasses. I need to find that and my hat.