My Salty Hat

I call my blog Find Five Seconds because often the most beautiful, wonderful moments in life are achingly short: the turn of a head, a blink of the eye, a second … or two … or five. I do my best to find those moments. Sometimes they are completely obvious, sometimes I need to search for them. And then there are times that come out of the blue in the most wonderful, unexpected ways. 

—Like this one.

I go to a lot of hockey games. The Lehigh Valley Phantoms, the American Hockey League affiliate of the Philadelphia Flyers, play at an arena only five miles down the road. Minor league hockey is all advertising and giveaways: t-shirts, posters, baseball hats. On baseball hat night I came home with a not-as-cheaply-made-as-I-thought-it-would-be bright orange beauty.

Last week we were on vacation in North Carolina. The Outer Banks. The beach. When you go to the beach you are required to have a go-to baseball hat. In a perfect world the hat is broken-in to the point of tatters. It should at least be soft, pliable, comfortable, and sun-bleached. Most of all, the hat must make a statement and reflect who you are as a human being. (If you scoff at that last description, then I just don’t understand your motivations as a person in general.) I had a Flyers hat for many years that was my go-to beach hat, also a Dune Burger hat that I still have but isn’t quite as comfortable as it used to be, and a Norwich University Hockey hat that I’m too scared to take down to the ocean because I might lose it.

This year, it was time for a new beach hat. Time to represent my hometown hockey team. I’d been wearing the Phantoms hat to games all winter, and I also wore it on my Group 9 trip out to California. (You can see me wearing it in photos on this very blog—making my head glow orange like I am some kind of tree in a mutant-neon citrous grove.) So, on the morning of our drive down to the Outer Banks, I grabbed the blindingly-orange Phantoms hat and threw it in the car. This would be my beach hat. My statement.

During my week at the beach, the hat required urgent, advanced, accelerated breaking-in. Through the course of the day, if the hat wasn’t on my head I would leave it sitting out in the blazing sun; scrub it in the sand; submerge it in the ocean water. At night I’d hang it on the clothes line and leave it there until the next morning.

And that’s what I did. The whole routine. Dunked that thing in the Atlantic Ocean more times than I can remember. It turns out that searingly obnoxious orange color was dyed into that hat pretty good, because it’s still plenty orange. But that’s okay. That’s my team’s color. Besides, I’ll have other weeks at the beach to give my go-to hat a thorough beating. And I’m walking a lot more these days, so I’ll wear that hat on every walk I take and I’ll wear it at every summer picnic I go to.

But still there’s still a long way to go. It’s a process.

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It’s always tough to come home from vacation. There’s a pit in your chest when you know that the life of leisure you’ve led for the past week is over, and must now face everyday … the ordinary … the routine. So you re-live the vacation by talking about it with whomever might listen, by looking at photos, by wearing the new t-shirt, or even by looking through the handful of receipts you jammed into your wallet while you were paying for a meal, or a souvenir, or groceries. Eventually, the pit in your chest runs its course, you go back to work, and life returns, pretty much, to what it was.

I went for one of my walks the other day. Wore my Phantoms hat. It was stinking hot and by the time I got home I had a good sweat going. On the way into the house I pulled the mail out of the mailbox, stepped inside, grabbed my hat by the brim, threw it on the chair, set the mail on the kitchen counter, and did my signature bad-habit: I licked my fingers before paging through the stack of envelopes in front of me.

And that’s when it hit me. Out of nowhere. I could taste the sea salt from my hat.

I was tasting my vacation. Tasting the salt water of the Atlantic Ocean, infused in that hat from countless dunks in the water, then dried by salty Outer Banks breezes and burning summer sunshine. I was back in my beach chair, with that dopey orange hat on my head, a Corona and lime safely tucked in a beer coozie in the sand by my feet, with a container of salted peanuts at my side.

The rest of my vacation rushed into my brain: I was sitting on the deck of my beach house at 5:30 AM scribbling on a pad of paper, writing what might be another book, as the sun broke the horizon at the ocean. I was walking on the beach down to Jennette’s Pier with Laura to meet up with Edward to have an early breakfast at Sam and Omie’s. I was taking a week’s worth of outside showers. I was having tuna and shrimp that most likely was swimming in the ocean the day before. I was helping to teach Casino, a card game Dad taught me, to Max’s girlfriend Isabelle. I was spending two wonderfully unexpected afternoons on the beach with Mom, who, along with Dad, instilled a love and reverence for the beach and the ocean that will never go away.

It all happened in an instant. A moment. A few precious seconds.

Sometimes I find the five seconds. And sometimes the five seconds finds me.