Natural History

Posted in Absolute Piffle, West Virginia | Tagged ushanka | 14 Comments

14 Responses

1. on December 8, 2013 at 2:27 pm DAC

   I have a Libby Riddles hat…

   
   
   • on December 8, 2013 at 2:52 pm retrieverman

     This one was purchased in Munich for me as a Christmas present. It’s made of muskrat fur. LOL.

     
     
2. on December 8, 2013 at 2:52 pm massugu

   My shapka ushanka also does well in the snow–I don’t like to wear it in the freezing rain though.

   
   
3. on December 8, 2013 at 3:55 pm May

   I like the hat. Eskimos say that there is no such thing as cold weather, only improper clothing? Myself, I think there is cold weather, and you are standing in it, but you seem to be fine with it.

   
   
4. on December 8, 2013 at 9:19 pm Clondaw

   Suits you sir!’j

   
   
   • on December 8, 2013 at 9:27 pm retrieverman

     I can’t wear a baseball cap without looking like a total Gomer. (Gomer Pyle being the reference).

     
     
5. on December 8, 2013 at 9:23 pm Clondaw

   My winter hat of choice is Peruvian style with tassels which I found hanging on a tree last winter. I only took it as it had been there for over a week.

   
   
6. on December 8, 2013 at 11:41 pm Doug Guggenheim

   You must have a cool collection of unusual hats lol I had one of those explorer hats when I was young.

   Looked a little bit like this one

   http://www.ebay.com/itm/Khaki-Pith-Helmet-Sun-Safari-Explorer-Hat-/190989267597?pt=US_Costume_Accessories&hash=item2c77d8f28d

   
   
   • on December 9, 2013 at 6:07 am retrieverman

     I just have these two.

     I have such a German “blockhead” that I cannot wear a baseball cap without it looking totally obscene.

     
     
7. on December 9, 2013 at 11:17 am May

   Baseball caps are for summer, or sunny warm days. Winter hats are for – well – winter.

   
   
   • on December 9, 2013 at 11:59 am retrieverman

     I don’t wear any hats in summer…

     
     
8. on December 10, 2013 at 9:07 am leashedForLife

   I’d suggest U slap the hat [with gloves, not warm bare hands –
   nor even cold bare hands] or shake it briskly *while still outside
   in the cold*, before entering any heated space; the snow will be
   knocked off, still frozen, & the pelts underneath the fur won’t get
   wet.
   Moisture isn’t good for furs – sheepskin is washable, but tanned
   furs are not. Ice or snow that’s knocked off the fur, still frozen,
   won’t dampen & damage the skins.

   Well-cared-for furs can last a very long time. I had a mink cape
   that had been custom-made as a graduation present for some
   lucky 18-YO in the early-1960s, which was in excellent condition.

   
   
9. on December 10, 2013 at 2:47 pm May

   Too many coincidences! Just before this post, I bought myself an alpaca wool cap that looks somewhat like your muskrat hat (no tassels).

   So, since my mental picture of you is now based on this photo of you (the only clear photo of you which I’ve seen) my mind says “Scotty is the one with the furry brown hat”.

   Due to vision problems i had through my childhood, i still often have trouble recognizing people who i know from people who share one major feature with them. Otherwise my vision is okay.

   There is no point in my trying to argue with this subset of my brain – it ‘knows’ that you are the one with that hat.

   So I was sitting eating lunch at a fast food joint wearing my alpaca cap, wondering how the recognition part of my brain was going to deal with seeing me in the mirror wearing a hat, when I look over, and see a man with a large head, and I recall the phrase about a German “blockhead” too large for a baseball cap.

   But I am not in west virginia. I often have to tell myself who could be, and who can’t be someone I know. Yet, I wait for the man to glance up from his paper and scan the room, as people who are eating alone usually do, and as far as I can tell, his eyes and face could be yours.

   But then someone else in the room looks like a younger Will Smith from “Men in Black”.

   It isn’t a problem that I think about much, and like deaf dogs who compensate so well that you don’t know they are deaf, it is rarely a problem. I only occasionally think “oh yeah, other people tend to sort what they see quicker and less consciously”.

   When I was a kid and started school, some teachers told kids who couldn’t see the board to sit up front. Other teachers made everybody sit in alphabetical order so it was easier for them to call roll and return papers. I adapted as well as I could. I didn’t understand that my vision was bad, just that if I let teachers label me that way, I got to sit up front where I could read the board. It didn’t quite occur to me that those kids who sat in back could see the board too, I assumed they behaved badly because they had no way to follow along – a reoccurring curse of where alphabetically order placed them.

   When I went to get my first drivers license I was surprised that I flunked the eye test. How could anyone flunk an eye test? If a person could walk around without running in to anything, they could see right? There must be a mistake! The man yelled back something about how he couldn’t give me a license with 20/200 vision! He said that I was not blind, but legally blind. Whatever that meant.

   What followed was agony. If I couldn’t drive a car, I couldn’t work. What was the point of finishing school? Id be useless. What would happen to me?

   My parents weren’t very reassuring, maybe not wanting to give me false hope, but it would of been nice if I had known anyone from somewhere else who would have told me that there were cities where there were buses and subways, places that built up not out, where people could actually not just walk the dog but walk to get to where they wanted to go.

   My mother did take me to an eye doctor who, to my HUGE relief, said that eyeglasses would fix it so I could get a driver’s license. The difference in my vision with glasses was so great that things seemed so close that I would, while walking, turn down aisles before the one I wanted to go down. Id reach for things which weren’t near yet. A few other girls laughed, so I took the glasses off to walk between classes.

   It was surreal, it was like always walking through fun house mirrors. What was normal for others was new and weird to me.

   I asked my dad about lines on some peoples’ faces, and he hit the roof accusing me of making fun of his age. I had never seen wrinkles. I had one old aunt who I had seen lines on, but it seemed like mascara lines to me, odd cosmetics maybe.

   
   
10. on December 10, 2013 at 3:34 pm May

    …….what followed were years of better, but not normal vision. The third time I needed new glasses to renew my drivers license, (they were 4 years apart) an eye doctor finally looked at my older sets of glasses, made calls and explained it to me.

    The first doctor wanted to make my weaker eye work more, so he gave that eye an eyeglass lens which made it 20/20, but he only gave the good eye an eyeglass lens to correct it to 20/40. So I went from being lopsided in favor of one eye to being lopsided in favor of the other eye! It was so bad that it I couldn’t walk straight. I had signed up for drivers education, so I had to learn to drive before I learned to see correctly. My confidence about my ability to drive was low because I really was having trouble seeing cars. I still drive like a timid old lady.

    My next glasses I bought when I didn’t have much money, the ‘doctor’ didn’t have much equipment. He measured the curve of one of my old lenses. The world seemed less lopsided but I still had never seen the world without fuzziness.

    The next doctor gave me much better glasses, but he was afraid to correct them all the way, since it looked, on paper, from the driver’s eye tests, that my vision was getting worse – though really it was just being corrected slowly. He didn’t want my eyes to be dependent on stronger and stronger glasses.

    I was just happy to see and be able to drive. Many years later, I asked an eye glass maker (not the kind who is also a doctor – there is a difference) if my eyes could be corrected beyond 20/20 so that I could see the dogs in the field better. He said yes. But I’m not sure if they were, or if all those years, my eyes were just getting new glasses made the same as the curve as the old pair, like with my second pair. (Watch, they don’t all measure the curve on BOTH glasses).

    I see fine now. But all those years, all of my childhood, I missed facial expressions and being able to identify people by their face. For example, the year before my first glasses, my best friend, who I met every day in the same place at the same time, was missing two days in a row. But she wasn’t missing at all. She was right where she always was.

    I couldn’t recognize her. Because my mind dealt with poor vision by finding clues about who people were. My mind was recognizing my best friend by the same sweater she wore, when it was colder and she wore I heavier jacket, I didn’t recognize her. She thought I was mad at her because I was walking by her and sitting near her but not speaking to her.

    I write this because now that you have posted a photo of yourself, you probably expect me to recognize you if we should meet, or if I see a different photo of you. But my brain doesn’t recognize faces very well, it just knows “Scotty is the one with the furry brown hat”.

    
    

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