I remember the first time I decided I liked the look of a hat.
I was twelve and still living at 2108 Belmont Avenue in Joliet, which backed up to Highland Park and was just up the street from Pilcher Park.
I had a visting friend (don't rmember who) and we had met up with another friend (Lisa) to go bike riding in Pilcher Park, the only time in my childhood I was allowed to go (have no idea why that day was the exception).
I remember Lisa making adjustments to her bike. She was wearing a hat.
I was hooked.
However, I didn't know anyone in high school or college who wore hats. The same was true as I entered my twenties.
Then when I was twenty-five, I joined St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in Homewood. The pastor's wife, Slavka, always wore a hat to church. A friend of mine, who joined around the same time, started wearing a hat, too.
I was too poor to buy a hat, so my friend bought one for me, too. More and more people gave me hats. I've probably had more than sixty hats over the years but have only bought half a dozen of them or so.
I've even had elderly women give me hats they wore in THEIR twenties - or hats that belonged to their mothers.
Below are a sampling of me in hats. This is by no means every hat I own. These are just the only pictures I could find.
I hope you have as much fun scrolling through them as I did scrolling through files and picking them out.
The first two are from my search a couple years ago for the perfect Easter hat. I could only afford one and noe of the hats in these pictures came home with me.
The next few photos are from a story about a vintage hat exhibit I covered, hosted by the Will County Historical Society. Our news editor at the time thought I should try on the hats, too, and run that as a column, since hats had become my signature "thing."
You see, since I had so many hats, I figured I could wear them to work. So I wore one the first day to establish the habit and have rarely wavered from that.
Rebekah took the photos with the cell phone technology she had at the time.
Timothy's girlfriend at the time took this photo as I was leaving home to walk to work. It's 2016, and I dubbed myself, "The editor in the yellow hat" a throwback reference to the Curioius George books, which my children adored.
I think Sarah gave it to me, but I can't remember for certain. It might have been mother. I just remember someone bought it on a whim for me years ago.
I wrote An Extraordinary Life story for The Herald-Years probably a dozen or more so years ago about a woman who collected hats. Her daughter showed up at the distribution center one day with the woman's hats and gave them to me, she liked the story that much.
This photo is from a WriteOn Joliet open mic night in 2017 at the Book an Bean Cafe (located inside the Joliet Public Library).
The owner, Tammy Duckworth, hosts us once or twice a year (pre-pandemic) and is one of the nicest people I've ever met.
My mother-in-law gave me this hat in the early 1990s. I remember wearing it to church when I was expecting Daniel, so in 1995.My mother-in-law leaned into Sarah and said, "Where did your mother get that awful pink hat?" Sarah grinned and said, "You."
Here I am at a book signing for Bryony with another former WriteOn Joliet member.
In 2017, I wrote a story about three Joliet Franciscans that were at least one hundred years old. As I took a photo of the Sisters with my cell phone, the marketing representative for the order took a photo of me.
This blue hat, one of my favorites, is also from the daughter of the woman who collected hats.
In 2018, Daniel's girlfriend Cindy treated Rebekah, Daniel, Bertrand the Mouse, and me to an afternoon on a cruise ship in Chicago.
Here is my sister and I inside my father's office on his birthday, July 17, 1982. At the time, my father owned and operated an architectual firm in New Lenox inside the former United Methodist Church building at 112 Church Street.
The New Lenox Methodist Church had built a new church in the late 1970s and sold this building, which my father bought in 1979 and converted into office space. It was, I believe, the first real office space in New Lenox.
The New Lenox Historical Society now owns the building. An Eastern Orthodox chapel rents part of the space, the same space that housed my dad's company and where I worked during part of my college years.
On thihs particular birthday, my mother suprised my father with a catered lunch and thought it would be fun if my sister and I dressed up as Victorian wait staff. My sister got to be the French maid because she was young and cute (as opposed to me at twenty and just three and a half months past my first Cesarean section).
Besides, I could wear my silk collapsible top hat, which I had found in my boyfriend's apartment (a Joliet police officer, now deceased) during my first semester of college in 1979. I think he had worn it to a wedding. I thought it was the coolest thing. He had no use for it. So I took it home.
My first husband wanted the hat. I gave it to him one Easter and never saw it again.
Three WriteOn Joliet members at a 2017 WriteOn Joliet Christmas party at Cemeno's.
Last year on Facebook, someone asked if I was going to wear a hat, so I did. This is one of the few hats I bought. I saw it at Walmart about seven or so years ago and bought it because I love blue.
It was too floppy to wear to work (kept obstructing the view of my computer), so I rarely wore it. But it was perfect to cover a story for Western Easter in a pandemic - a church pastor singing Easter humns and playing his guitar from his balcony.
In 2015 (I think), Timothy and I sat on the corner of Glenwood Avenue and Republic Street is Joliet and gave away candy to the passersby.
But he had seen the hats and thought of me. I still have the hats, and I still think of Ron when I wear them.
We had four cats when we were in-between homes, and it stressed them to get bounced around from house to house of other relatives. Finally Hope ran away and was gone for three months. As the weddding of my oldest son was beginning, Skinner Animal Clinic in Wilmington called to say it had my cat.
Hope had found her own home in Morris. When the new owner took her to his vet for a checkup, they found the chip and called us. We were in a rental situation at the time and could not keep all our cats.
One of them, Frances, also found a new home at a shop in Morris. She is now back with us as our situation has changed. Hope is still in Morris because the new owner is very attached to her. We still have open visitation but have not seen her since the pandemic began.
I miss her, the stinker.
Rebekah and I pose for a quick photo for Witches Night Out in 2013 at the old Joliet Junior College Renaissance Center in Joliet. Rebekah oversaw my table while I joined my Writeon Joliet conrades in an ongoing open mic event.
A promo photo for the BryonySeries at the former P. Seth Magosky Musem of Victorian Life in Joliet. A Joliet costume design had made the dress for me, which I ruined by spilling coffed down its front at a book signing at Frugal Muse in Darien.
A member of the marketing team had arranged the shoot. He wanted me unsmiling for, you know, the "Victorian" look. Rebekah laughed at me from behind the scenes.
The at is a real vintage hat, again from the collection of vintage hats from the An Extraordinary Life woman.
I saw it in a bin at a craft store on the way to checkout. It's a top hat, purple (a BryonySeries color), and has a spider web nettting that you can't see - perfect for to advertise a book series that features some vampires.
My mother bought me this big purple hat with feathers to wear to a Witches Night Out event at the Renaissance Center in 2012. Rebekah took the photo because we thought we ought to have one for marketing. I sold a surprising amount of books that night, so the photo was an afterthought at the end of the event.
Cell phone technology has certainly improved through the years. Dig those gloves!
Another photo from the Renaissance Center in Joliet. This time, I was covering a story for The Bugle on the "groundbreaking" of the new Joliet Junior College city center campus.
Timothy was a student at the time and worked the event. I bought the coat from a sale rack at Marshall Field in Louis Joliet Mall for $150 at the end of 1998. The fabric is amazing, and I said at the time I would probably never own another winter coat - the fabric would outlast me.
That may be true.
However, the coat is now coming apart at the seams and has already been restitched in places. Rebekah gets it professionally cleaned for me a couple times a year, and it always comes back looking brand new.
The hat is another one from the An Extraordinary Life collection. It has a magenta ribbon with gold ribbon through it and a large magenta rose in the front (all of which you can't see).
It's a favorite hat of mine - both for the look and because it fits my head perfectly.
Ed Calkins wanted to recreate his morning pose at a middle of the night book signing for the release of Visage at the newspaper distribution center in Rockdale.
I'm wearing that same winter coat and a black felt hat I bought in the late 1980s to wear with a red and black dress to a wedding. I still wear that hat. It works well with lots of different clothes, still looks new, and fits just right on my head.
This hat and coat is the official uniform of "The Goddess" in Ed's first novel Ruthless.
The "pose" is the way he would hand me my paperwork at one o'clock in the morning, every morning. I took out more newspapers a day than any other carrier (mroe than nine hundred and fifty), with Ron close behind me at eight hundred. And the kids were in the center with us nearly every day, studying spelling words while they rolled. They have amazing work ethics to this day.
So Ed dubbed me "The Paper Goddess," which he eventually shortened to "The Goddess."
Here I am, along with Bertrand the Mouse, in 2017 at Dottie's Art Studio summer art camp in Plainfield. She had invited me to visit three sessions and read selections from three different BryonySeries books so the kids could illustrate what they read.
The hat is a heavy leather hat. It had belonged to my paternal grandfather, who died from colon cancer at the age of 62 in January 1969. I was in the second grade and only met him once, that I recall.
But the memory is a good one. And the hat makes me feel close to him.
Timothy took this photo of me taking a picture of the holiday lights in Plainfield in 2019. The hat was a gift from Daniel. It has a cat on the front and a place to put a battery so it light up.
The battery part has long since fallen off. But I love this hat for its good fit. It doesn't creep up over my ears the way many winter hats do.
And that is that.
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A homework assignment for one of my sons, Timothy Baran, a Joliet Junior College culinary arts student.
He had to carve "something" into chocolate, so he picked the cover of "Bryony" for his inspiration.
Not pictured: the wood bark impression on the back of the chocolate block.