And to Top It All Off, Teens Hide Under Hats

We’ve got hat trouble in our house. Baseball hat trouble mostly, although the skull cap--a red wool thing pulled tight on the crown and down on the forehead--has recently reared its ugly pinhead.

Basically, we think they should remove the blasted things now and again, if only to let their scalps breathe. They think we’re trying to suffocate them.

Welcome to the generation gap of the ‘90s. Once, parents and children argued about Vietnam, racism and premarital sex. Today we argue with our kids about hats. Hats .

It’s a sign of the times: Things are so horrific out there that we’ve seized on the most mundane, the most superficial, the least threatening of issues. Hats. It’s a lot easier to debate when and where to keep the lids on than to muster a substantive dialogue about the deleterious effects of Mortal Kombat and misogynist rap lyrics.

The hat thing is essentially a teen-ager thing, which means it’s first and foremost a control thing. We parents aren’t the only ones locked in this least heady of contests. High school administrators are currently engaged in varying degrees of authoritarian crackdowns on hats in the classroom.

Students, predictably, are fighting back, appearing at school board meetings--hats on--to argue their right to free expression. Citing imminent danger to the educational process, principals are holding fast to increasingly Draconian dress codes.

I am highly skeptical that a small swatch of cloth on the noggin can somehow impede reading comprehension or algebraic problem-solving. But I do understand how irritating, how galling, how intrusive those eye-concealing visors can be to the sensibilities of the authorities. Unfortunately, I can well understand how school officials have been reduced to staking their dominance on a duckbill.

It may be difficult for the uninitiated, but you have to try to imagine what it’s like to sit across the dining room table from nearly grown, supposedly intelligent people who do not speak, who consider a muffled grunt loquacious, who stare blankly, vaguely, in your general direction when you cheerily ask them how their day went.

You have to imagine what it’s like to put a hat on such a beast, and thus be deprived of even the blank stare. You have to consider that the beasts, by donning such headgear, are, in fact, brandishing yet another weapon in their arsenal of indifference.

It’s no wonder, then, that we, their keepers, although we certainly know better, are quickly overcome with primal rage. It’s no wonder that we find ourselves screeching: “Hats off! Hats off!” Whereupon the beasts silently, slowly, and with complete contempt, comply. And then withhold even the grunts.

The degree to which hats have colored our family life cannot be underestimated. Those white MSU caps they wear: How do you think they stay white? Why, they have to be run through the dishwasher, of course. In fact, we’re now being asked to purchase a certain circular wire mold designed specifically for dishwasher hat-cleansing.

“The whole place looks like it’s been taken over by a bunch of ducks,” my husband often grumbles upon venturing downtown. It is indeed an appalling sight--five or six of them packed in a car, bills quacking to the music.

Strangely, there have been times when I’ve taken the kids’ side on the great hat issue--that is, when the grandparents get involved. My father, for example, seems to find a baseball cap in his presence to be a grave offense against Western civilization.

“It’s just the fashion,” I tell him, shrugging with indifference. I have to stop myself from grunting.

Well, the characters may have shifted, but the roles aren’t much changed after all, I guess.

And I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised when, on frosty mornings when a bit of head-covering might actually serve some constructive, healthful purpose, suddenly, defiantly, the hats come off.