One thing about the place where we live is that I often wear a navy watch cap. I think that the actual caps issued to members of the U.S. Navy are available at surplus stores, but it isn’t important to me to have one with an official designation. Some people call the caps beanies, and I think there are several other names. The caps are made from wool and fit snugly on the top of my head. My mother used to knit a lot and she made many, many similar caps. She was also a spinner and sometimes the caps were made from wool yarn purchased at the store, and other times from wool from local sheep, carded and spun into yarn by hand. Sometimes she would attach a pom pom to the top of the hat. I liked the pom poms when I was younger, but these days I prefer a plain cap.

The pom poms were a source of conversation in our family. Mother taught us kids how to make them out of scraps of yarn and one year, when she was making a large group of hats for children who lacked sufficient winter clothing she enlisted us in making pom poms for those hats. My father claimed that the pom pom had a practical use. He, as is now the case with me, was frequently bumping his head. He had a similar pattern of male baldness that I now have, and there were often bumps and scabs on his forehead from running into things with his head. He claimed that the pom pom would give him warning of overhead obstructions. We teased him, however, that they must not work because he kept bumping his head.

Whatever the purpose, I somehow have grown to prefer hats without the decorative or headache preventing items.

I hadn’t thought about pom poms for a long time, but this morning I read a news article on the BBC website that got me to think of them once again. However, I had to learn the British term for pom pom in order to understand the article. The writer of the article calls the item a “bobble.”

It seems that a very worried woman, in her sixties or seventies, was waiting at the Lower Moss Wood Nature Reserve and Wildlife Hospital, in Cheshire, when it opened one recent morning. In her hands she had a box, lined with newspaper in which she had placed a small dish of water and another with cat food. She told workers at the animal rescue center that she had found the baby hedgehog on the side of the road. It didn’t have any obvious physical injuries. It wasn’t bleeding and didn’t appear to been crushed. She told the people at the center that it hadn’t moved since she picket it up and it had not eaten nor passed any waste all night long despite having been given food and water and she was worried. She hoped that they might be able to save the tiny animal.

The box and the animal were taken back for the veterinarian to examine and shortly afterward the vet came out to inform the woman that it would not move because it was not a hedgehog. “What is it?” she asked. “A hat bobble,” was the answer.

You probably saw that coming after the setup in the opening of today’s journal entry. At least I now know what a hat bobble is. The article that reported the incident had a link on it to another article that reported that biologists have recently discovered five new species of hedgehogs. The pictures with that article show very cute, appealing creatures. I didn’t grow up in a place where hedgehogs are common, but I know they are kept as pets by some folk.

I still don’t prefer hats with pom poms.

I suspect there are several reasons why I now own multiple navy watch caps. One is that I live in a place where it can seem colder than the reading on the thermometer because our relative humidity is usually much higher than was the case in any other place that we have lived. I find that the wool caps are just what is needed to make me comfortable during the winter around here. I suppose that the fact that I have very little hair on my head these days adds to my sense of it often being cold up there. A second reason is that regular visits to the dermatologist in which I have multiple pre-cancerous lesions frozen combined with a couple of incidents when I had to have squamous cell carcinoma removed surgically to make me take seriously the doctor’s advice to always were a hat when spending time out doors.

Whatever the reason, I now keep a spare watch cap in my pickup and another in our car, along with a couple of extra floppy summer hats, so that I will always have something available to put on my head. In addition, I have another watch cap that is generally in the pocket of my jacket when I head outdoors. I’ll wear one under the hood of my rain jacket when it is raining. The wool keeps me warm even when it is wet, so if I don’t have a jacket with a hood, I don’t fear walking in the rain when I have a watch cap on.

I can now add another reason for preferring a cap without a pom pom. I don’t want to go around looking like I have a baby hedgehog on the top of my head. I know nothing of the poor woman who had tried so hard to properly care for what she believed was an animal in need. I suspect that she was completely well meaning and simply wanted to help another creature with whom we share the planet. I know that I am easily confused and that I’ve had that quality for decades, long before I became what I now recognize as an old person. I really hope that the staff at the animal hospital and the people who read about the incident don’t make fun of the woman.

I will continue to wear a cap without a pom pom just in case I might one day lose one and cause some other well meaning individual confusion and embarrassment.