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I wear a lot of hats. I don’t mean that figuratively. I own more than 50 of them, most in the category of sports caps.
I wear them – even indoors – for several reasons. It’s become a kind of trademark.
I wear them to protect against sun damage and skin cancer. I wear them because cataract surgery left me sensitive to bright lights.
And, yes, I suffer from the sin of vanity, so that I think I look a little better if you can’t see the wasteland that once was a decent head of hair.
As Elaine Benes once said to a girlfriend about George Costanza: “He’s not bald. He’s bald-ing.”
But of all the places I have worn a cap, I have never once worn one to bed. Tonight, with the polar bomb blast reaching its icy fingers across Florida, it may be the first time.
During this frosty stretch of winter, I have slept well enough, wearing a long sleeve shirt, and pulling the covers up to my chin.
Most people say that they sleep better in a cold room, but when a freeze makes everything in the house feel cold, I am awakened, imagining that all my body heat is escaping from the top of my head, with no rug of hair holding it in.
Once I am awakened, I realize that a trip to the bathroom is in order. As I pitter-patter in bare feet across the tile floor, I can hear the north wind bending the trees and scraping the house. I am shivering.
I need a cap. A nightcap. No, not a shot of whiskey. Something to wear on my head. Something to help me keep warm so I can sleep.
On Christmas morning, my grandson Donovan offered a dramatic reading of “The Night Before Christmas.” Written in 1823, it offered these lines: “The children were nestled all snug in their beds / While visions of sugarplums danced in their heads. / And Mama in her kerchief and I in my cap / Had just settled down for a long winter’s nap.”
Aha! Mama slept with her head covered, and so did Papa. In the Golden Book edition from 1949, two of the three children, a boy and girl, are sleeping with their heads covered. We know, from what happens next, that this house had a chimney. But if they kept a fire in the fireplace, Santa would end up – like a lying politician – with his pants on fire.
Remember how hot it was this past summer? It seemed like the air-conditioners would hum forever. Record heat turned global warming from a scientific abstraction into an irresistible force of nature. This week, global warming was the last thing on anyone’s mind.
My meteorologist informed us that the frigid weather was attacking Florida from two of the coldest places on the face of the Earth: the North Pole and Siberia.
I knew Putin had something to do with it! Just curious: Do they sleep with nightcaps in Greenland?
Roy Peter Clark is a writing instructor and vice president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.