The Quiddity of Things: Part Two

 

My interest in the Quiddity of Things extended to items of sartorial fashion. Perhaps the most desired (if also the least likely that I would have the nerve to wear in public, even today) was the Top Hat. Simply EVERYBODY had one, all over the entertainment media, from doctors to magicians to snowmen to showmen to gentlemen in the Victorian adventure tales so popular at the time. Even a few months before my birth, John F. Kennedy was the last president to be inaugurated wearing a top hat.

So eager was I to own any kind of top hat that in Third Grade I raced ahead of all activities in the school fair to the ‘general store’ sale to purchase a red glass top hat (used originally as a table-setting feature). I had no use for it, of course, except as a nest for a toy owl (I’m obsessed with owls, as well). A Bowler was the next in the headgear to be desired (again, Laurel and Hardy and such), with the colonial tricorn (influenced by Ben and Me) a distant third. A cowboy hat, being all too common in everyday Texan attire, was nowhere in the running.

Another one of my backward-looking obsessions was the Muffler, or Scarf (though I tended to avoid the term; scarves were for ladies). Not so much for the warmth they provided, I suppose, as for their panache. Huge examples were worn by coachmen and other Dickensian characters like Mr. Pickwick or Bob Cratchit and, once again, snowmen. As a WWI flying Ace, Snoopy sported one as an appointment. Unfortunately, at the time these articles were mostly relegated to women; I guess men were supposed to be too hardy for such folderol. The muffler made something of a comeback later, first with Dr. Who and then in a big way with the Harry Potter phenomenon; the ubiquity of the Hogwarts House colors finally allowed me to fulfill this dream.

I was singularly unlucky with my eyewear as a boy. The one pair I ever had I got in Second Grade, and they were made with the lowest grade thick black plastic rectangular frames imaginable. If they had been round, though equally nerdy, I do not think I have minded them so much; there was at least precedent for them (and I was so deeply old-fashioned as a child as to be almost non-conformist to the age). I lost that pair at a Circuit Assembly in San Antonio the same year, and my parents never thought it worthwhile to replace them. This led to several difficulties with my learning over time. I did not get another pair until the early Eighties, which I paid for myself.

What I really coveted was a pair of Pince-Nez eyeglasses. They seemed the almost stereotypical choice of style for doctors, professors, lawyers, politicians, preachers, and other learned types who didn’t have to work with their hands. Not at the time, you understand, but in all the old movies and TV shows we watched. Even Teddy Roosevelt (not then treated with so much obloquy as he is today) had pince-nez pinched onto his nose. The closest we ever got were the plastic replicas that were still included in every toy doctor’s kit.

Nowadays, of course, thanks to the Steampunk movement and various Fantasy franchises, these style choices are not considered quite so outré as once they were, although they are once more fading away. When I was little, they were confined to ‘de-evolved’ versions in female fashion or worn by hippies (like granny-glasses) in parody of traditional values. But what I desperately wanted was the true old solidity of the genuine articles, and perhaps some of the dignity and character that they seemed to indicate to me.