My favorite hat when I was small (notice I didn't say little) was a red knitted tam that my mama made for me. It was her first go at knitting and to be honest, it was far from perfect. But I loved that hat. For weeks I watched, nearly hypnotized as she counted stitches.

"Knit one, pearl two," she would mutter to herself, and before much longer the cadence of her voice and the sound of her knitting needles click, click, clicking, would lull me into a peaceful sleep.

The tam was a wee little thing and if Mama had known what she was doing, she might have finished it in a day or two. She had no idea, so it took her two months to complete it.

She wrapped up the red tam in white tissue paper that had small red hearts stuck all over it. She gave it to me appropriately on Valentine's Day. It was always too small, but I thought it was beautiful and once I put it on, I hardly ever took it off. It sat perched atop my head from early morning until I went to bed at night. I wore that red wool tam until the weather got so hot in July that big drops of perspiration made my Shirley Temple curls go SPLATT!

Eventually, my head grew bigger and my hair got thicker and there was no way my tam would stay on without a box of Bobbie Pins holding it in place. But I tried my best to make it work.

One day Mama walked into my room while I was trying to anchor the thing on my head. She snatched it away from me and promptly left. Next thing I knew she had given my beautiful tam to my five-year-old cousin who said it smelled like a wet dog and refused to wear it. If I'm not mistaken, my red Valentine tam ended up on the head of my cousin's Boston Bull dog the day they took photographs for their annual Christmas card.

Early in my life, I learned that each time I wore a hat it gave me a feeling of having gone the distance in dressing up. Having something on my head was the finishing touch and it was important to me. Hmmm. You think I might have been some kind of a princess in another life?

Even to this day I still adore all shapes and sizes of hats, although I look pretty silly in one now. My hair is much too short and my face way too wide to wear a hat well.

I tried once to wear the then fashionable baseball cap that looked so cute on Meg Ryan. Well, it isn't rocket science to notice that I will never be a Meg Ryan clone, so putting on a baseball cap either frontward or backwards just ain't gonna happen for me. Not in this lifetime. If you ask me, we should bring back the lowly tam, make it a fashion statement for the twenty-first century. With no front and no back to contend with, it's bound to be a hands down favorite. Especially for mothers learning how to knit.