The Intelligence Estimate

I got on the train tonight I noticed something weird. Everybody getting out of the car I was waiting to get into was wearing a paper hat. An ordinary, run of the mill newspaper hat. I didn't think much of it. The Belmont stop, my stop for work, is the best way to get to boys town. Plus it's just south of Wrigleyville, so there are a lot of festive drunkards to be had on any given day. I figured the paper hat people were all in some bachelorette party or something. That was until I saw all the people IN the train that had them on too. This made me a little nervous. I don't know why. I just wasn't ready to be festive.

I looked around at all the people wearing hats. They didn't seem to be clustered together as though they were in a group. They didn't seem to be paying attention to each other at all. In fact, they were just going about their regular routines like nothing out of the ordinary was going on at all. Like they just got up that morning, went to the closet and picked out their best paper hat to wear to work. Ho, hum. Another day at the office.

That's when I saw him. Hat man. He was in his early twenties, probably in college. He was wearing a thick flannel coat and a paper hat. He was seated in the middle of the car frantically folding paper hats and, without saying a word, giving them to people to wear. He would just walk up to people, hold out a hat and motion to his head as if to say, "you wanna hat?" There was no rhyme or reason to who he offered the hats to. No one was descriminated against. If you wanted a hat, Hat Man was at your service. He had a copy of The Chicago Reader and he was quickly making his way through all the sections. I now feared I was not going to get one. "He's gonna run out of paper," I thought. He made eye contact with a few more people and made them hats. "He's not going to get to me," I thought. Then he reached into his bag and got another section of the paper. He looked up at me and pointed to his paper. I nodded. He folded. I'm still wearing the hat. I'm wearing the hat as I type this.

I wondered what we looked like to people on the platform as we whizzed by each stop. Whenever new people got on our train car they looked at us a little funny, until Hat Man approached them. Then their faces lit up and they too were in our gang. It was simple, it was poetic, it was beautiful. And it was a lot of fun. I couldn't stop smiling the whole way home, which is about a 20 minute ride.

Hat Man got off the train 4 or 5 stopps after I got on. He stepped to the door and looked around at his creation: all these smiling people. Then he tipped his paper hat to us and stepped off the train.