The Case of the Missing Hat

I am 75 years old.  I am bald.  I like to sleep with a window slightly open for fresh air even though I live in northern New York where the winter night temperature is often below zero degrees.  Because my son often leaves his two dogs at our home when he works I close my bedroom door when I retire for the night so they do not wake me early in the morning with slobbery kisses.

So it is that at the beginning of the present winter I began wearing a knitted woolen toque to bed at night to protect the hairless surface from the chilly breezes entering my window.  All winter long I’ve faithfully donned my hat when I go to bed, and just as faithfully it is always somewhere other than on my head when I awake.  Sometimes it lies flat on my pillow.  Other times it is above my pillow either on the bed or having fallen down over the mattress end.  At yet other occasions I may find it down among the blankets in some odd area.

This morning, as usual, my toque was missing from my cranium.  I sat up in bed, hung my legs over the side, remembered to look for my toque, to be unable to locate it.  Not on the pillow.  Not above the pillow.  Not down by the end of the mattress.  I continued to sit on the edge of the bed as I searched among the blankets to discover—nothing.  My wonderful little head warmer was totally among the missing in action.

I gave up, and decided I would strip the sheets and blankets later to find it.  I reached for my dresser drawer, grabbed a pair of socks, and drew them up over my feet.  I then proceeded to stand and reach for my long underwear hanging on a wall peg.  With long johns in hand I turned to look where I was about to sit, and there was my toque.  I had been sitting on it the entire time I had been searching for it.  Foolish old man.