Ruinous George
The Man With the Yellow Hat Has Regrets
The man, when he was young and uncertain of himself — a time when we wish to make ourselves known, somehow — had spied in a shop window a preposterous yellow hat. Feeling momentarily bold, in those flashes that come over young people, those thunderclaps of certainty that can take sudden hold, and prompt us to do or say or believe things that in repose we might not, the man strode into the shop and plucked the hat from the window display and set it on his head. Without so much as a glance into any of several mirrors arranged throughout the shop, the man marched to the counter and yanked out his wallet.
The shopkeeper, an older man who’d seen many such outbursts in the young, and knew them to be fleeting, tried courteously-yet-firmly to redirect this young man toward something less flashy. The shopkeeper, after all, had instincts honed by many years, and knew in his heart that this broad and attention-getting thing was simply more hat than this young man could pull off. The shopkeeper could see quite plainly that this was an unremarkable young man, a wallflowery man born to wear earth tones, a man not able to withstand the kind of notice such a hat was guaranteed to attract. The shopkeeper invited the young man to consider a trilby from a nearby rack, say, or any of the more modest newsboy caps on the shelf just there. The young…
