Down in the basement, in two five drawer metal filing cabinets is all that remains of my mother's life. Her public life anyway. If I mentioned her name to you you would not know it. She was not famous like some other women of the era, such as Gloria Steinem or Betty Freidan or Jane Fonda.

In fact she would be bolting out of her grave if she knew I was bringing up her sainted name along with THEM. My mother was their enemy, though Gloria and Betty and Jane never knew it...I think.

I am thinking, however, that I want them to know it, and thanks to the invention of the internet and the fact that I saved her papers from a bunch of glory-grabbers, I may let her have her say in cyberspace.

It is said that men get their character and personality mainly from their mothers. As I get older I find that to be true. I have my father's common sense and impatience and my mother's attitude when it comes to righteousness and civility. When I think of it, this combination should have gotten me further along life's road, and the only reason I can think it hasn't has been a wholly unique trait of my own, called procrastination.

That's going to end soon, when I get around to it.

My mother died in 1997 of a horrible disease called sarcoidosis. For older fans of MTV you might remember a VJ called Julie Brown, not to be confused with Downtown Julie Brown. This Julie Brown was of northern european stock and not African heritage and is probably the most famous person who had sarcoidosis. She is still alive as far as I know.

Sarcoidosis is one of those orphan diseases, as opposed to a celebrity disease like HIV/AIDS, breast cancer and heart disease. What this means is nobody cares. Few people get it on a percentage basis compared to breast cancer and heart disease, and HIV/AIDS which has its own lobbying group, so Sarcoidosis is not a big deal. More people die in bathtub accidents. The thing about this disease, which causes lesions to grow on various body organs, is that it does not strike everybody the same. It's not that the disease wouldn't want to wreak the same havoc --it strikes mainly northern europeans and people of african decent-- but each body it enters into has its own defense. Some bodies are stronger, that's all, and can fight off the attack on vital organs.

When my mother came down with Sarcoidosis in the seventies we (and she) didn't have any idea what she had. She started to lose wait, feel week and her color was bad. Trips to her doctor turned up nothing. I was nineteen at the time and was convinced it was lung cancer. My mother was a heavy smoker. On one cold day in January my father carried her skin and bones body down the front stairs and into the car. She had put off seeing a specialist long enough. I drove, tears in my eyes, a few miles over to tell my grandparents, her mother and father, the situation in person.

A few days passed and the tests came back. It was what again? We all scrambled to look it up, but the main words that stuck in my head was "not terminal" and "treatable". Sigh.

My mother was not healthy most of her adult life. She started out strong, on the south side of Chicago, St. Columbanis parish, but was struck with polio. She survived a 106 degree fever with her teeth ruined, and was partially paralyzed, but considered herself lucky as she was eventually able to walk again, with a limp, but she had cheated the iron lung. She also use to get a kick out of taking her teeth out of her head and scaring us toddlers.

Further complications of the polio and fever which also destroyed some spinal column discs brought a back surgery in the mid nineteen-sixties. In those days they got to the spine through the front, so all her guts were laid out like a dressed deer. She was laid up in a body cast in a hospital bed in our dining room for six months. We got our first air conditioner then, a huge window unit that needed a 220 amp outlet. That outlet, painted over, is still there today.

My mother's Sarcoidosis went into remission, but before she was given enough steroids to keep the entire Chicago Bears team pumped up for a year. Steroids, or "roids", cause the body to bloat, hair to fall out, personality to change, and can kill you just as certain as the disease if you're not careful with them.

Eventually the ravages of the steroids decreased and while still a younger woman she returned to looking like someone who resembled human.

Things were happy but her fighting spirit turned away from her physical problems to bigger issues.

She had had her issues even before her bout with the orphan disease, but after being latched to the hospital bed for six hot summer months she decided that she would attack those bigger issues and decided to save the world and America, and not necessarily in that order.

What can I say, my mother thought big.

My mother was not content to let the CIA fight the commies; she wanted in. Soon we began to see writings by Mr. John Birch, Father Coughlin and Phylis Schlafly. I didn't see the relationship between a missionary, a long-dead Catholic priest from Detroit and a lady who ran something called the Eagle forum, but my mother did -- for awhile.

She was armed with their thoughts and words and was going to win that cold war all by herself. She even took on a bureaucratic organization bigger and more dense than the US Government, the Catholic Church. The bishops here were in her scope, and she even had problems with Rome.

What a bitter drink it was. The days were the late sixties, the seventies and even into the eighties. Those first two decades were ones of turmoil in this country. Anybody who thinks there is trouble and dissent now was not around then. Or forgets. Cities burned, black versus white was fought with bricks and bullets instead of lawsuits; cops and soldiers were scorned; the "establishment" was not to be trusted. We even had a walk out at Evergreen Park Community High School over something which was so unimportant it has slipped my mind.

My mother did a little spying too. She and her friend, Dolores, infiltrated a radical community organization once, and obvious "front organization" dressed with blond wigs and long coats and asked pointed and revealing questions of the government officials in attendance and of the pinkos running the "taxpayer funded group". Fearing her cover was going to be blown she and Dolores skipped out before the end. She had been gaining a local reputation and was starting to be recognized in gatherings.

In time my mother saw that Reagan and the Pope John Paul-II were doing macro battle with the Soviet Union, and that the "Captive Nations" were on the verge of having walls fall, so she resigned the battle with the Commies and focused on the one institution she really wanted to save: the Church.

Actually she feared the Commies were in the Church too, and what could be better proof than Vatican II? That meant Latin was out, priests faced the people, and guitars were strummed in place of the beautiful pipe organs.

Heresy and the smoke of the devil.

She may be right yet.

During this time my mother started an organization called, "Catholics for Truth in Education", known about the kitchen table as "CTE". She and her friend Ann, wrote these detailed papers on the bad influences within the Church, some caused by Commies and some caused by the Devil, which were one-in-the-same to her really. These were sent to clergy and lay people across the country. Often we would take calls from some bishop here or this book author there.

At the time I mocked hunting the Commies in the confessional, but I was just out of my teens and in my early twenties. I knew everything. My mother predicted the scandals with pedophileia that would bubble to the surface decades later, because so many of the bishops were corrupt.

There were many other right predictions too, having to do with politics and social institutions.

The orphan disease, Sarcoidosis, didn't stay an orphan though. In the early nineties it came back, and forced her onto oxygen as the lesions has attacked her lungs, made them brittle, and made activity very hard. She used to say, "Richard, when you can't breathe you can't do anything."

Mostly the battles were fought by this time. My father had died in 1987, and my mother did things with her friends. Not world saving things, but enjoyable things like going up to our place in Michigan and floating around on the pontoon boat, or visiting craft places up there and buying nic-nacs. The warrior rested.

My mother smothered to death on August 20, 1997. I was there when she died and so were my sisters and her brother, but it was agonizing for her to live and agonizing to watch. Determined though, she went two weeks prior to her dying, confined to a wheelchair, to get her drivers license renewed. I think she only passed because the lady giving her her eye exam (which she really failed) knew that my mother would not ever be behind a wheel again. I decided to have "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" played as the procession hymn out of the church at her funeral.

The more that time passes the more things big and small I see my mother was right about. Not long ago I went downstairs and pulled out some of those newsletters. This validated my thoughts. I had saved her work from some hangers-on "friends" who wanted to keep her organization going and could they come and get the file cabinets. Had it not been one week after she died I might have said yes, but I couldn't deal with them snooping around in her house when the body wasn't even cold. All they would have done is take credit for her and Ann's work.

The internet, the scanner and the PDF file format has convinced me to put these papers online for anybody to see if they wish. This will be my winter project. I will not procrastinate. Promise, ma.

My mommy fought the commies. Now communism, as a ideology, is only thought to be a workable system by Hollywood actors, a few non-literate songwriters, and about ninety percent of college professors. My mommy fought the commies, and while you might not know her name, Mary Catherine MacLeay Davis --there are still a few out there that do-- and she contributed, unheralded, to a fight that went on for the last half of the previous century.

My mommy fought the commies while many mommies fought their husbands over the color of the walls in the living room. That's okay though. Not everybody can or should do battle. There is a price to pay, and sometimes we were sick of her fighting the commies. We wanted at least half the attention that the Kremlin got.

My mother dying of Sarcoidosis was good fortune for one man that I can think of.

My mother was a patriot too, and loved the blessings of this country, and had she been around when those planes crashed into the World Trade Center buildings she would have been on the first flight to Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden, you are lucky Mary Catherine MacLeay Davis is not after you.

See, my mother had told me years ago about radical Islam. All I said was, "Sure. Right."

Right.

Copyright 2007.  All Rights Reserved.

Probably the most important women during my early years, with the possible exception of my own mother, was Ann. Ann lived on 102nd St, 2858 W. to be exact, and she meant the world to me.

I was telling a kindred spirit, M, about Ann's. M had once lived briefly on my childhood block, but it was long after Ann's had closed. I could tell she missed the experience.

And the rest of the neighborhood kids too.

If you could run away as a kid and pick anywhere to live you would have picked Ann's.

And Ann was one of the meanest women (it seemed) that you would ever want to meet; yet we loved her. She had ham-hock arms and a permanent scowl, but all that was overlooked.

Ann owned Ann's, a true candy paradise planted right in the middle of a residential block. She lived in the back and sold penny candy and cheap little toys to kids and bread, cigarettes and milk to adults.

My grade school, St. John Fisher, was just down the street, and lunch time often meant a detour to Ann's for a a Bazooka Joe bubble gum, a pack of candy cigarettes, Dots or Flying Saucers.

The excitement used to build when you would round the corner and see the big metal tent sign in front of Ann's. The sign had an advertisement on it for "7-UP", and of course had "Ann's" spelled out on it. As the sign grew closer the taste buds in my mouth used to water. Finally I reached the little blue house, pulled the screen door, and entered sugarland. Sometimes I entered with a note from my mother to please sell little Richie a pack of Kent cigarettes along with my own candy version. Ann did so with a grunt.

Ann did most everything with a grunt. If you took too long to pick out your candy she grunted. If you didn't count the pennies correctly she grunted. If you wanted a brown paper bag she grunted. But it was music to our ears.

Ann's was unique, or at least a dying breed of a place, in and around the southside of Chicago and suburbs where I lived. Talk about a convenience store. What could be easier than walking, running or riding your bike to Ann's? It was the coolest thing: a store right in between regular houses. What I wouldn't have given to live next door!

For the longest time Ann's was the place for a kid with a sweet tooth and with moms who needed bread and smokes --and not necessarily in that order. Then construction started on 103rd Street for a 7-11. This was to be a real convenience store, a corporate one.

It opened and some of us went there, but only usually when adults sent us there, or because we were older now and needed an item in a pinch that Ann's didn't stock, like deodorant.

I'm not sure what year it was, but rumors were about that Ann was sick. Not long after the metal sign disappeared and was replaced by a "For Sale" sign.

There's not a time when I don't go past that block that I don't think of Ann and Ann's. It was never Ann's Store or Ann's Candy and Cigarette Store; it was just plain Ann's.

As part of my lazy research for this entry I drove past Ann's. The frame house is now a sprightly yellow but is pretty much the same. It stretches back along the lot more than the surrounding houses, as it was once so much more than a residence, but has seen no major remodeling on the outside.

I noticed an older man sitting in back near the garage. I wondered if it were Ann's son. (Did she even have a son? Any kids that were really hers?) No, the house was sold after all. Still I wanted to walk up to the screen door, walk in, and take forever to spend spend my quarter on some penny candy.

Copyright 2007.  All Rights Reserved.

When you find yourself suddenly single after many years of being in a relationship it takes some time to get your bearings. One day you're busy trying your best to love someone and the next day you find out that you've been tossed to the porch. My day was on New Year's Day. We had just finished a kind of tradition and had gone to a local mexican restaurant, Maro's Tacos. The food was good as usual. Maro's has grown from basically a takeout stand to a full-fledged restaurant with an outdoor patio. I had three tacos; my soon-to-be ex had a burrito. It was pouring rain that night when I got the message (Boy, did I get the message!). I pulled over and we talked for a few moments, and that was the end. Actually it was much more dramatic than that, and it's a subject for another time, but in the days and nights and weeks to come I found that I had a lot of time on my hands. We had become quite an insulated couple, and had not cultivated new friends and rarely saw old ones, so without my former love there wasn't much to do.

One friend I did have is probably the one person responsible for almost quite literally saving my life. S you know who you are. Thank you. S had had a terrible divorce about two years prior, and was insulated from the outside world. We had met through work, and I was kind of a shoulder to cry on. After the divorce was final S went on some of the online sites and tried her luck. Every-so-often she used to ask me about various guys she had met in the virtual world. At that time, being in a relationship for sixteen years I begged off by saying that I didn't know what it was to date anymore, didn't know how it worked and didn't know the language.

Little did I know that a very short time later I would be borrowing space on her shoulder to cry and begin a steep learning curve to learn the new language of love.

She suggested I try the online world. Actually I don't know if she so much suggested it but I thought that I would learn from her example, or at least try to expand my horizons "in the comfort of my own home."

I went for numbers. I signed up on Match.com, the overstuffed elephant of singles sites, and got busy.

A little background. I am not unfamiliar with meeting someone by using a third party, or a medium besides bumping into someone in a bar or on the job. Some sixteen years prior I had placed an ad in the "Meeting Place" as the lonely hearts classifieds were known in the Chicago Suntimes. I was twenty-nine years old and had not been in a steady relationship for many years, was tired of being alone, and my father had died not six month's prior. I kept hearing what I thought was his voice. I stalled for awhile, but the voice got stronger, so I placed a little 53 word ad, that started by saying "Marriage Minded? I am." In some ways I think the old-fashioned way may have been better than today. I received about a dozen responses, and in those days you had to be more picky, you couldn't click, write and delete. You had to put pen to paper and take some pictures (I didn't require them) and put them in an envelope and trust the United States Post Office with any future romance. The last letter I answered was from the person I'd spend the next sixteen years with. When I called, after the basic greetings, she asked what had taken me so long. I didn't say until later that she was younger than what I had asked for in my ad. She was just twenty-one, a nine year difference.

At that time there was a stigma attached to placing an ad in the newspaper looking for love. You were branded as a loser. My mother went to her grave not knowing how we met. I never told her, even years after the relationship was going and long after we both gave little thought to how we met. My two sisters don't know to this day, unless my uncle confessed.

So I have used the media to find love, and I would again.

But it was a brave new electronic world.

I composed a long and thoughtful profile, uploaded a picture, and pumped in my credit card numbers. Love was in the wires. A few short moments later I entered my zip code and --holy mutha!-- I had fifty pages of women who were promised to be my perfect match. And with about twenty women per page I couldn't miss. Like shooting fish in the old singles barrel. Hey, Happy New Year, best thing that could have happened to me. New bodies yet to conquer!

I began emailing my certain new loves. I did this in the morning and left for work. My first volley of emails and the responses would leave me in a much better world at seven that evening.

I booted up... and found no responses. It had to be a mistake. I looked all around the site for the hidden messages, but there were none. Worse, nobody had found my profile irresistible, and I had had not one inquiry, not one woman pleading with me to just talk with her.

This was the way it was for probably two weeks. Then I connected! I received an email from a woman in an fairly close suburb. We emailed back and forth and then finally chatted on the phone. We talked a long time. She was intelligent and funny and owned her own business and worked out every other day at a downtown fitness club.

We agreed to meet.

I was nervous. I texted my friend S and gave a play-by-play. I asked her if she would like to join us. She thought that it wasn't necessary and wished me luck.

My date was a little late, but I waited patiently. These are the hardest minutes. I just kept telling myself that it couldn't be too hard. If nothing else we get a nice dinner out of it and that was that. Good food, a few laughs and then scram. But why should I be worried? She had her picture posted, and she was cute. And smart. And funny. And worked out.

The sun was setting when my date arrived, and I was standing just inside the restaurant when she finally entered. I must say that only one word filled my head upon first seeing her, and that was "curvy". I realized then how much things had changed since my 53 world ad. There was a whole new internet dating language, and I needed a translator. My date literally filled the doorway.

And...she was dressed in pink from head to pinkie. She even had a pink purse. And a pink wallet inside the pink purse. I thought only one mean pink thing, having to do with packadurms. Pink packadurms.

After a rib crushing hug we sat at the bar for what I thought was a cocktail but turned into a four course meal. Shall we order an appetizer? Sure. Why don't we eat at the bar. Sure. After wiping her pink lips on the napkin after our first course she suggested two more. I couldn't help but notice the bartenders wide eyes. I couldn't eat one more thing. Then came dessert.

All the while we chatted, usually her with her mouth full.

I can't say that it was a bad date as far as major problems. It was just a voluminous date. Never, I thought, had so much been eaten by so few. It was dark when we waddled outside, but due to the luminous pink dress my date filled it was not hard to keep track of her. After another bone crushing hug that would have made Dr. Heimlich proud we parted.

Ms. Pink wanted to know what I was doing the next day, Saturday, and I lied and said I was working. In truth I spent the better part of the day walking and exercising to try and get the bulge out of my gut. Then later that Saturday evening I sat down, just me and my computer and Match.com, and tried to make a quick study out of the new language of love.

Copyright 2007.  All rights reserved.

I've been to his house before. Abraham Lincoln's house in Springfield, the only one he ever owned. His tenure in the White House was like all presidents, an eight year benefit at best.

The place looks pretty good for an old house. They are doing repairs. Lincoln lived here for awhile after moving from a small settlement called New Salem a few miles away. Springfield then was the place to be, the place to make fortunes, and Abraham Lincoln came to town to do that.

And to forget.

Lincoln was a southern boy, up from Kentucky via Indiana. He left home to seek his place in the world and ended up in a scattering of houses above the Sangamon River, called New Salem.

There he had an experience that scholars say colored his entire outlook on life.

He fell in love. A young girl, Anne Rutledge, nineteen, caught Lincoln's eye, and he fell hard.

Anne, an inkeepers keepers daughter, was not long for this world, however. She fell ill and died. Lincoln spent a few moments with her just prior to her death. Seems that Anne had given up on Lincoln and was engaged to another man, but her heart was still with him. Nobody knows what was said during those few hours that Lincoln spent with Anne, but it is said that she confessed her love for him, and that she had not wanted to be engaged to this other man, who, in fact, had not been seen in the parts for about two years.

But Anne had waited for this man to return from New York. History is not clear if he ever did return to Anne.

Lincoln was not the same after Anne Rutledge was buried on the prairie. He wandered about the country, abandoned his friends, lost his famous sense of humor. He was what today would be called depressed.

Out of this sadness came a resolve to become more than just a prosperous lawyer in the backwater of the country. He began a political career that would in short time take him to the White House.

He did so by promising to end the most horrible crime against man that existed in these United States: to end the enslavement of human beings and to fulfill the words set forth in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal, and to make the Constitution whole.

Some say he was just being a political opportunist and seizing an issue to make him stand apart. That's doubtful. Dark days in the White House and the blood of hundreds of thousands would seem to speak against this. There are easier ways to become politically famous, even back in the 1860s.

There is a cemetery not far from where I sit tonight. Buried beneath an ordinary gray stone is Anne Rutledge.

Lincoln freed the slaves, but he was a slave of sorts too, it is said, not to the woman he married and who bore his children, Mary Todd, but to the memory and love of a young girl in a pioneer settlement who loved him like no other.

Though gone many years she walked with him throughout his life and no doubt helped him bear up and keep the Union together.

Lincoln's tomb is a huge monolith of a stone in Springfield. Thousands visit each year. It is soulless and cold.

Had Abraham Lincoln had a choice he might have wanted to be buried about twenty miles up the road in a cemetery with the woman who drove a awkward and homely country lawyer to achieve immortality.

He kept the Union together, perhaps out of love. He could not keep his own union together with Anne Rutledge. Not in this world anyway.

Tonight I stood in front of Lincoln's home. There were no bus loads of tourists; I was all alone on the street. I've been in his house before, and it struck me that we as a country owe so much to a women who never lived in the house.

This is the inscription on Anne Rutledge's grave, written by Edgar Lee Masters in his <i>Spoon Riiver Anthology</i>:

OUT of me unworthy and unknown
The vibrations of deathless music;
“With malice toward none, with charity for all.”
Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,
And the beneficent face of a nation 5
Shining with justice and truth.
I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,
Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,
Wedded to him, not through union,
But through separation. 10
Bloom forever, O Republic,
From the dust of my bosom!

He was in my sights. All I had to do was just get a little closer... a little closer, and then my problems would be over. For that small patch of road. I was taking aim a slowpoke in the left lane. I wanted him bad. It had been a horrible traffic day here in Chicago.

The joke used to be around here that there were two seasons: winter and road construction. It ceased being a joke and has become reality. There's no escape. Every interstate, highway, main road and ally has orange cones and horses placed helter-skelter on the pavement.

Many times that is all there is. Often there are no construction workers. Sometimes there are, and they are usually on break, or lunch, or leaning on their shovels, or chatting. What they really are doing is laughing at us poor suckers stuck in the fumes going nowhere.

I'm not above flipping them off. I used to think that it's really not their faults; they are just doing a job, but I've revised that thinking.

They are ripping up the road just to tick me off!

Yes, that's the only reason -- and I am pissed off. I have been driving these Chicago area roads for over 30 years, most of it for work. My office is my car, and it really sucks when you have to pee. You can't just dash to the restrooms. Especially in construction. Those guys and the occasional token women holding the sign are laughing so hard at me that they are almost pissing in their pants. They know you've got a pain in your bladder, and they know you might be trying to do the bottle thing if you're a guy or the wide cup thing if you're a gal.

They are ripping me off in a bigger way because their bosses at the construction companies --the same one or two politically connected ones-- and their unions know they are putting down inferior stuff that just has to be torn up in another two years.

It never ends.

The other night I was driving late on the Tri-State Tollway, a piece of road that was supposed to be paid off in 1984, but somehow isn't. It's just cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching, into the toll baskets and politician's pockets. With no warning there are cones, cones everywhere. Scattered about. No rhyme or reason. A busy exit is coming up and semi's and cars are weaving back and forth trying to figure out the magic path of orange cones to find the exit. A truck just missed me, and I just missed another car.

Just ahead of all of us tollway bing- bongs is a truck belonging to The Big Connected Construction Company dropping cones like seeds.

Signs all over warn that if you injure or kill a construction worker you will get the gas chamber. You have plenty of time to read each word, as usually you are passing the sign at an infant's crawl. I wonder how many construction workers have been killed versus motorists trying to figure out the red cone and horses puzzle?

Is the Big Connected Construction Company liable for crashes and deaths of motorists? Do we some how sign a waiver when we pick up our driver's license that if we are smashed paper thin by a confused truck driver we won't sue?

Last night we had a monsoon type storm, so the Road Construction Puzzle was made worse by traffic signals out, and an unbelievable amount of freight trains that just seemed to want to get out of town today. Nobody was going nowhere.

When you could get that stretch of road where you could accelerate to 15 miles per hour, you get the slowpoke in the left lane. That guy almost died today at my hands. He doesn't know how lucky he was. I better not see him tomorrow!

Winter is just around the corner. Relief? No. Not really. If it is a mild winter the Construction season continues, and even when the snow flies the red cones and horses are still out to get you. Nobody picks them up.

The construction workers? Most are on unemployment sitting on their asses, watching Jerry Springer, and waiting for another season of tormenting people who are just trying to get somewhere.

I saw a driver with one yesterday, and it occurred to me that I hadn't seen one in a long time.

A hat. A driver wearing a hat. A fedora to be more exact, that iconic piece of haberdashery that defined the first part of the twentieth century.

My car raced up to the bumper of the eighties model car and I slammed on the brakes. The phrase that raced through my mind was a popular one maybe twenty years ago: "Never Follow a Hat"!

I guess you can attach a number of meanings to that phrase, but in this case it referred just to making the right choice when young and driving. Guys with hats were speed traps. They chugged along in all lanes and trapped or boxed you in, so your jets were cooled as they said.

The fedora itself was probably sent to the hat box by jets, because prior to that most serious men needed to be topped off with one in public.

It is popular history that John F. Kennedy killed the fedora in 1960 by not wearing one at his swearing in as President at his inauguration. He was young, good-looking and somehow a fedora would have looked just plain old on him, no matter how rakish the angle.

My grandfather wore a fedora right up until he died in 1992, at the age of eighty-nine. So did his known and unknown contemporaries. You won't know his pals, but you do know Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and of course Clark Kent. (I wonder how many orphan hats were found in phone booths in Metropolis?)

These hats were the uniform of the private eyes, newspaper reporters (think press pass in the hat band), and the man disappearing into the marble and limestone skyscraper to accomplish some important task for his work day.

My father didn't wear a fedora. He owned one. It sat on the coat closet shelf for the thirty years he lived in the our house. The only time is saw the light of day is when I used to take it down and play gangster with it. "Yeah, yeah, you doity rat!" When asked why he didn't wear it, he would just say that he had enough of hats in the navy.

This time, when I recovered from jamming the car brakes, I caught myself and didn't scream, yell and curse to myself. Or at him as would have been my normal custom as I raced around the offending hatted driver. Instead I took a breath and thought about the barley visible man reaching up to the steering wheel.

He could have been Superman. He may have fought in the Battle of the Bulge, been an old gumshoe, perhaps he was a not-so-mild mannered reported for a great daily newspaper. Maybe he was old school gangster.

At any rate, he is a dying breed. Literally. You just don't see them on the road that much anymore. Or anywhere but maybe doctors offices.

There is a haberdashery selling hats of different types within walking distance from me, The Optimo Hat Company. It makes custom hats, and claims that it is one of the last of its type in the world.

Thanks to Optimo and a couple more like it, a younger man can wear a fedora and at least look like their grandfathers. But in reality it will only be the look. The fedora in American history is ingrained in our memory as the hat that built the country, then was removed in war time to save the country and of course tipped to women as a courtesy.

The modern young man in the thousand dollar suit will only be following a hat, no matter how rakish the angle.