I got a new hat

I'm holding the old hat in the bottom two images: up top, the new one. I received the old one from a friend, while I was at Chapel Hill. He picked it up at a genetics convention in New Orleans. I associated that hat with various Walker Percy personas: Binx, Thomas Moore, Will Barrett. The new hat was bought by Jami while at the Methodist General Conference in Dallas - but it's not so much Percy as Whitman. I've received both hats while living in the Chapel Hill - Durham area.
When I was a kid, a small child, I had a hat from my grand father that I wore every where. It looked just like that hat Jed Clampett wore on the Beverly Hill Billies, with its hole in the top and felt construction, rumpled and misshapen. My parents were apparently embarrassed by it, and one day dad buried the hat out in the woods.
I was distraught. But then my dog, a beagle that I named Beagle, a dog that enjoyed digging in the woods, brought my hat back to me.
Dad was flustered of course. Years later, after I'd forgotten the affair of the hat, he would bring it up to me.
This new hat poses none of the issues of the old hat buried in the woods. It is clean and intact. It smells of the jungle its material was hacked from; the texture of the strong hands that shaped it are oiled into its structure. It receives from me the sweat and shape of my head on its smooth unremarked surfaces. When I walk on the forest path, under the sun light trickling through the forest canopy, my bald summit is shielded from the blistering heat.
Over me, around my head, it forms a halo of golden joy.