Fedora

Happy Thanksgiving to all; I hope you ate lots of turkey, or if you are vegetarian, then...whatever you ate for Thanksgiving, I hope you ate plenty of it. Days like Thanksgiving make me appreciate how hard it would be to give up meat. As for Black Friday...I hope no one was injured/trampled this year. Once again, people amaze me. Not in a good way. Shopping at three in the morning? Who does that? Plenty of people, but that's beside the point. Whether you went shopping or not, I hope your Thanksgiving weekend has been good. Mine was scrumptious. And now for our feature presentation.

Fedora
Country and rock,
guitar tinged with mariachi trumpets
three weeks atop the charts
forever associated with another life--
a yellow room
warm summer breezes
through my west-facing window.
evenings spent at the ballfields
the smell of a leather glove
and Kenny Chesney on the radio,
with the windows down
on the way home.
As these simple recollections pour from my headphones,
for a few minutes
it is easy to believe
that the straw fedora atop my head
is a cowboy hat.

Note:
As I was on my way home from a football game earlier tonight, the song "Beer in Mexico" (great song, I know) came up on my iPod. This song, which did in fact spend three weeks atop the country charts during the spring of 2007, always reminds me of summer evenings in my hometown spent playing baseball or softball and listening to the radio in my bedroom with the widows open. Needless to say, upon hearing this song, I was inspired to write this poem. I really was wearing a fedora.