The Cop Hat

The Queen of Guilford and for a moment now a cop.

The Cop Hat

We knew it was coming. Dorothy's father was a retired Cincinnati Police officer, who I'm sure had chased me many times while I was a teen. We never really knew because I never got caught. Ha-ha.

Donny, her brother, inherited the hat and made the mistake of bringing it down to the kitchen to see if it would fit me.

It wouldn't fit him, and on my head it looked like a tiny party hat. Their mother, Juanita, could wear it, and before Donny could grab it back from her, Dorothy scooped it away and put it on her head. It was a perfect fit, but then....her face got real serious like it did when as the Queen she would sentence some peasant to be dragged through the creek. Or like it did when she put on any hat. She assumed the mentality of that occupation. Shrinks may call it something like adaptive role; we just called it being a nut.

Donny and I knew her history with hats and we tried to run out of the room and up the steps because we knew trouble was coming. 

"Freeze," she yelled.

We stopped and looked at each. Greta, our family Doberman, sat next to her leg.

"Stay, Ripper," she said.

"Who is Ripper?" Juanita said.

"Did these two felons try to rob you, maam?" Dorothy said to her mother.

"What?" her mom said.

"She's part of our gang," Donny said. "The leader. We call her Ma Bogie."

"Yeah, that's right," I answered. "Just like the old Ma Barker gang."

"Up against the wall, scumbags," Dorothy yelled, reaching for cop gear that wasn't there.

"I'll whup your ass with a switch," Juanita said. "I can still do it, you know."

Greta suddenly came over with a ball in her mouth.

"Traitor," Dorothy said. "I think all of you should spend a night in the box."

The box was the castle dungeon.

We all looked at each other, even Ma Bogie.

"We have to get that damn hat back now."

We rushed her, even Juanita. The dog went crazy running in a circle. Donny grabbed the hat and sprinted upstairs to hide it. Dorothy wanted to know why she was sitting on the floor with her mother on top of her.

"You were playing with Greta," I said.

Soon she was back to what we consider normal in our house.

We usually prayed to all the gods and burned all hats in a fire pit, but since it was their father's hat, we hid it in the attic so Dorothy wouldn't arrest anyone who came into the house.

We had avoided another disaster.

The Cowgirl Hat

It's true that her personality changes with each hat change.


The Cowgirl Hat

It started with her taking my truck and my brother-in-law on a mission to find rocks. I shook my head at Donny, like he was a man being marched to his execution. I had to back the truck out because last time she backed the car out, she ran into a wheel barrow full of rocks and it fell and crushed a roof gutter for the new roof (which I thought was in a safe place on the ground away from the driveway until it could be put back on).

As soon as she put that hat on, she began speaking like she was a country girl and started humming country songs about being done wrong. I knew then we were in trouble.

"We're gonna build this here garden wall," she said. "And you all are going to help."

I ran back in the house while Donny looked out the back truck window with his eyes as wide as cue balls as they drove away. I was going to call him on the cell phone and tell him to knock the hat off her head so she would stop being a cowgirl, but I knew he could never do it. We're big men, but we are at the mercy of our women: his sister who is also my wife, recently retired, and there is no escape from a woman with time on her hands. She had taken over our outside domain.

I waited for what was coming. They returned with a truck full of cut rocks from Lowe's, 114 of them. The tires seemed almost flat.

"How much do those rocks weigh?" I said.

"Eight pounds," she said.

I climbed on the back of the truck and picked up a rock. "This doesn't weigh eight pounds. It's more like twenty pounds."

"They told me eight pounds," she said.

I took one of the rocks in the house and weighed it.

"It weighs twenty-one pounds," I said. "I want all that weight off the truck."

Dorothy pushed her hat back. "Well, stud, you best get that truck unloaded or I'll lasso ya."

Donny smiled. "I'm building the wall with her," he said. "I don't unload."

"Lasso me? I'm gonna burn that hat."

So I unloaded all 114 rocks, something like 2394 pounds of them and saved my truck. Then, I went and hid in the root cellar all day. At the end of the day, the wall was built. Donny went upstairs and passed out from sun and exhaustion. 

She finally took off the hat and said: "Who built that wall?"

"I did," I said. 

"Where's Donny?"

"He slept all day upstairs."

(The hats must have a life of their own because she didn't remember who she changed into when she put them on. I thanked God for helping me.)

"Well, he can go to the soccer game with me tomorrow."

(Our grand-daughter had a soccer game in Milford, Ohio. The last time Dorothy went to Milford she got lost and ended up 50 miles north, but that is another strange story.)

So I get to stay home while my son-in-law works on our deck, and Donny gets punished for not working on the wall.

Won't he be surprised. We're gonna have to burn that hat.

The Wall of Doom

The NRA Hat

Was she the new Dirty Harry?

Dorothy never does anything halfway, and that includes her weapons of choice once she became interested in securing our living space. We already had a large dog, three growling cats, a free range feral hog named Clementine, a nineteen foot python trained to squeeze any strangers unless we give them the nod, a small African rhino trained to charge vehicles, and my Northside brother-in-law and me, the fanatical Northside Marine. Despite all those things, she insisted on dropping her domestic role to become a pistol-packing mama, once she got her NRA hat.

"We shouldn't give her that hat," I told Don, my brother-in-law. "She's going to go nuts again like she did with other hats and helmets."

"I know," he said. "But she already saw it."

Sure enough, the next morning she had it on. She had several holsters picked out for purchase, and then she wanted to shoot our guns and get her own guns. This was at five in the morning, and sometime during the night she had already set up targets in the yard. So we had shooting class every morning for a week before she went to work. She could already tag you between the running lights at 200 yards with a rifle, but she wanted to be an upclose handgun defender. We picked up more used brass than a Marine Corps shooting range. 

Then, she was ready to face the dangerous world, more confident than before. You can't tell, but in the picture above she is toting a 44 magnum, a derringer, two 22 caliber pistols, a 25 automatic, a switchblade taped to her leg, a stun gun, a billy club, brass knuckles, and a gas grenade. And that's just to cook dinner at home. I've caught her looking in the mirror and saying stuff like, "You looking at me," and "Feeling lucky, punk." A few times I thought she was talking to the mirror but it turned out to be my brother-in-law.

"She' scaring me," he said.

"Stay away from her while she's got that hat on," I said.

So once again, after several weeks of her Annie Oakley act, we stole the NRA hat while she slept and burned it in the firepit after pleading with all the gods. She woke up the next morning like Snow White and hasn't touched a gun since that day, but she is deadly as hell with a French knife so we stay clear while she cooks.

Dennis Latham Books Galore

The Foreman Hard Hat

I'm Da Boss And Don't Ya Forget It

  The moment she put on that hat, she started barking orders at me and her brother. She took over operations in the yard, making us lift boulders the size of a VW bug and trimming grass with scissors. We constructed a firepit and she wanted us to plant herbs and carnations and other non-manly stuff. Some people came to cut down some high tree branches, and she started ordering them around and one of them fell out of the tree and she fired him.

  "Let's fall down," I told my brother-in-law. "Maybe she'll fire us."

  We tried falling down and even acted like we broke bones, but it didn't work. She simply barked more orders at us because we live there and couldn't escape. We started calling her Miss Scarlet, like the girl in Gone With The Wind who kept ordering people around all day and night. She kept that hat right next to her for weeks when she wasn't wearing it. She even had us picking up clothes and making our own beds. That was the last straw.

  One night after she fell asleep, I stole the hard hat, and in a ritual ceremony where we pleaded with the gods, we burned it in the firepit. She was back to normal the next morning, meaning she would soon find something else to wear on her head. Hopefully, it won't be another hard hat.

 



The Joan of Arc/Dirty Peasant Soldier Look

Not many people know that during the historical period when Joan of Arc led the French in battle, there were many women fighting right along with the troops. Dorothy wanted to discover what it would have been like to be a peasant woman soldier back in the days of Joan of Arc. She could either give herself fleas, scurvy, various bug bites, lousy food, consider knocking out several teeth, learn how to swing a sword...or she could just wear the steel helmet, which weighs somewhere around nine pounds.

She chose the helmet over all the other fun peasant stuff, and claimed it wasn't any worse than the helmet she wore as a baton tosser in the Aiken High School Band. She kept walking around bumping into things and looking like someone who belonged on the little yellow school bus.

It took me a week to get her to take the helmet off and another week to uncross her eyes. I'm having trouble understanding this sudden compulsion to wear stuff on her head.

The Makeshift Sun Hat

Dorothy forgot her sunscreen and forgot it was going to be hot. She even forgot her husband when she went to the game. He stood in the driveway, a broken man. She claimed it was so hot that her brain was about to fry. So why not make a sun hat out of a shopping bag? The strap makes a perfect hat band while shading the back of the head so the brain doesn't boil. If she lived in Holland, she could pass for the Little Dutch Girl. When using this bag, make sure it is empty. Just another one of the weird things she often wears on her head.

How Stuff She Wears Started

This is what we call the "urban cloaking SSCL device" from a class at the Guilford sniper school. The SSCL stands for sanitized shitcan lid. It fits well with her overall attire and has a built in visor to protect against the sun and deflect small caliber bullets. When used with the black AK-74, she has that all business sniper look for those tough missions beyond the office.

(It started as a small idea. I needed a story for a column I had been writing for Far Sector Magazine, and my lovely wife actually agreed to wear the lid on her head to help me with the story. I have to say that is true love.)

Since that time, she has developed into a dedicated sniper, and she can blend in with any group of available shitcans for undercover operations. Some people may say this is demeaning to women, but as a deadly urban sniper, she can tag you between the running lights at 200 yards nine out of ten times.

So now, we have dedicated an entire blog to the stuff she wears on her head at different times and for different reasons.
From now on I will call her the "Singing Sniper."