It was time for something really warm I thought as I went about choosing a new winter casquette (cap) at the Galéries Lafayette department store in downtown Paris. I tried on one after another of the French bonnets, which to me look like Navy watch caps, and other stocking caps.  I just wasn’t going to buy one of those flat caps that the Parisian old guys wear. I’m not old like them, I told myself. I don’t look like them. I just don’t want to be like them.  But none of the bonnets fit right, looked good, or felt good.

So, out of the frustration of not finding a good cap in the style I had been accustomed to – and after checking out another department and being told the stocking caps there were too flamboyant for me and, in addition “sont pour les jeune hommes (are for young men) – believe it or not, I returned to another shelf of casquettes in the original department, the type of caps I’d noticed on the majority of older gents throughout Paris. I tried on a flat cap that I’ve now come to know as a casquette vendeur de journaux made of velours côtelé, a black corduroy “newsboy’s cap.”

Voila! The cap fit me perfectly. It fit right. It looked good (my wife, Karen, told me so). And, it really felt good. I felt downright at home in that cap. I had found my cap!

As I have moved around the streets of Paris wearing my new black newsboy’s cap, I’ve been pondering this question: Might my purchase of a new cap have been a signaling, an acceptance, of my actual age and stage? Have I become, almost overnight, a genuine, certified “old guy?”  Although I’ve been moving into and working on this life transition for some time now, the shift – signified by my comfort in this cap – has been smooth and easy.

I’ve been trying on this new designation as I’ve been trying on my new cap.

Interestingly, perhaps amazingly, I like it – that is, the designation as well as the cap.

I’m happy with my new cap. I’m happy being an old guy.

The Roman philosopher, Cicero, is reported to have said: “I am…pleased with the old man that has something of the youth.” Well said, Cicero! That’s helpful for me.

I am an old man who has something of the youth: my newsboy’s cap and a young man’s heart!

I have my newsboy’s cap. I have my old guy’s reclassification.

I am now prepared to move on with my life.

Voila!                                                                           David Hagstrom November 24, 2013 Paris, France