The Hat Man
It is the same route every week day. From the office, through the park, to my apartment. So familiar that my bike could find its way without me.
A couple of days ago, I left my bike at Buddy’s place after a house party at his flat. Today, he’d brought it back to me at the office. “I parked it where you usually do” he says, then gives me a hug and hands over the lock keys. I thank him but it’s only when I prepare to go home that I realize he’d pumped the tires, adjusted the seat and cleaned up the brakes. The ride was effortless, almost ridiculous in its joy. I flew through the streets so fast, gliding with a grin on my face and my back bent forward, leaning into the speed.
Just a block away from my apartment, I abruptly hit the brakes: books.
A striking green door, weathered and wide, stood on the sidewalk. At its feet, a stack of books carefully left out for someone to find. I scan the collection but quickly realize they are in Polish. “Impeccable taste” I think to myself, mindlessly hopping back on my ride while my eyes remain glued on the covers, too beautiful to ignore.
I am about to pedal off when I see him. Just a few meters from my apartment, still in the sun-drenched hush of the evening commute. There, in the honeyed sunlight, I meet the Hat Man.
I decide very quickly in my head that he will be the Hat Man, not merely a man with a hat. He is small and white-haired, his steps unhurried as he strolls the Berlin sidewalk, moving with the slow grace of someone who has learned to savor the world. Yet it is his enormous hat, so defiant and impossible to overlook, that announces him.
Astonished by my own surprise, I find myself circling the question: how could something, as simple as a hat, so thoroughly unseat my expectations? It is just fabric and form, yet it commands attention, reshaping the air around him. Without it, he might have dissolved into the soft anonymity of the evening crowd, another quiet life passing through the city’s arteries.
I wonder what lives beneath that wide, audacious brim. Is it a secret, a shield, a silent rebellion? Does he wear it to stretch his shadow, to stand taller against his stature? Or is it a sartorial manifesto declaring that, in a world so desperate to blend in, he would risk the crime of being unmistakably visible? Perhaps it is simpler still: a private joy, a small ritual of selfhood.
Enchanted and absent, I ride on autopilot. The mind, I realize, is quick to fill in the blanks of strangers’ lives. I catch myself projecting, layering my own puzzles onto the silhouette of a man I’d never known.
For a moment, I linger, suspended between curiosity and admiration, marveling at how a single, deliberate choice could transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. That hat is no trivial adornment, it is an enigma designed to intrigue and unsettle any curious soul who happens to cross its path. I think of the silent choices we make each day, the things we show, the things we hide; how, now and then, the smallest details can send gentle ripples through the ordinary, unsettling the world just enough to make us see it, and ourselves, anew.
I rein in my wandering thoughts and choose to honor the man, sensing in him no trace of rebellion. He seems too innocent for large-scale subversion. Perhaps his wife made the special hat for him, and he wears it with quiet disregard for society’s tastes; a small act of devotion, or a subtle defiance. I, however, settle for a final version: beneath the oversized brim, the Hat Man hides an object. Likely something dangerous, the hat’s size a clever disguise for a secret carried unnoticed through the city; or possibly it is something as ordinary as his daily folded newspaper.
As my thoughts race ahead of my wheels, I realize that whatever the Hat Man decided to hide beneath his hat today, it now also carries my restless curiosity. A silent invitation to notice, to wonder, and to hope that, someday, our paths will cross again and I’ll be caught up in that chaotic magic once more.
