The Man of a Thousand Caps

When Ema started clearning the house of Gumpy's clothes after his memorial service, I had some mixed feelings.  I thought she was jumping into it a little early but that was more because I was not quite ready for the process.  She needed to do it to start the healing process, so after every visit to the farm the family undertook, we always left with some article of clothing.  We finally got down to his baseball caps.  That is when I realized just how extensive his collection had become.

There were caps from the Waldron Telephone Company.  Four of them to be exact.  There were Detroit Tigers caps, Texas Rangers caps, several Centennial Acres caps and one lone Bryden Canyon cap.  Some had funny illustrations while others were fairly plain.  Instead of count, I just stood admiring the vast collection before selecting a few that would leave me with the best memories of Gumpy.

As I put them in my car, I remembered the seminal moment of Gumpy's cap collection.  At least I like to think I was present for the beginning of this impressive collection!

It was a fairly cloudy mid-summer day about 22 years ago.  Ema had gone up town for something, leaving Gumpy and I to fend for ourselves.  Meaning that we needed to play some golf before we grabbed lunch.  Since it was cloudy, Gumpy decided to leave the cap at home because he certainly would not need it to shade his eyes.  My job was to load the golf clubs in the truck, which I did with great care.  Then when Gumpy started walking to out to the truck, he felt a raindrop land on his head.

At least he thought it was a raindrop.  He asked me if I felt the rain, which I did not.  He reached up to the top of his head and felt where he thought the raindrop had landed.  Except it was bird poop.  A nice big chuck of it right on his bald spot he tried hiding with his signature comb over.

I howled with laughter as he cussed a blue streak on his way into the house.  He washed his hair, put on a cap and we finally left for a few holes of cow pasture pool.  The cap fixation was officially on!