Eighty Yards to Everywhere

For twenty years, I had occupied the back of the hat museum's storage shed. Retired, they called me. Abandoned to the company of empty boxes, I called it. Once, I had delivered crates of soap through streets that smelled of breakfast and rain. Now a spider operated a more successful delivery service between my handle and the wall.

Then Marisol, the museum carpenter, opened the shed. With her came Dev, who carried a clipboard. "The traveling hat exhibit needs something memorable," he said. Marisol gripped my handle. At last! A person who understood that four wheels were an invitation, not a decoration. I prepared myself for distant roads.

They rolled me into the workshop beneath a board with the heading "Ready to Roll." Dev wrote, "Display wagon. Courtyard route: eighty yards." Eighty yards sounded suspiciously modest. Perhaps it was the distance to our departure point. Below the board hung an old photograph. Its caption read, "Delivery wagons once carried goods between local shops." Naturally, I considered this an excellent description of important work.

My restoration began the next morning. Marisol removed a cracked sideboard and fitted a new one in its place. I regarded this as an indignity, an insult to my distinguished appearance. Then she pressed the old board with one finger, and it crumbled along a split. I revised my opinion. A grand traveler could hardly scatter pieces of itself along the route.

Next she cleaned my axle, the rod beneath my bed that helped support my turning wheels, and checked each wheel. Fresh paint followed: deep green, with a narrow gold stripe. "That should brighten the courtyard," Dev said. Brighten the courtyard? I looked ready to cross a continent. Still, I could not tell whether his small smile meant admiration or amusement. Humans keep their thoughts inconveniently hidden.

On Friday, they loaded me with padded stands holding hats: a straw sunhat, a velvet cap, and a broad hat trimmed with cloth cherries. Each stand was fastened securely to my bed. I had expected trunks, maps, perhaps provisions. Apparently, my passengers preferred traveling light. Marisol tucked my old delivery photograph beside the hats. "Your story belongs in the exhibit too," she said.

Saturday arrived with clear skies. Marisol pulled me from the workshop while Dev walked alongside. Visitors followed our little procession, moving together down the courtyard path. At the fountain, we paused while Dev explained how hats could show the work people did. I waited for the gate to open beyond us. Instead, Marisol turned toward the riverside pavilion, still inside the museum grounds.

"Eighty yards exactly," Dev announced when we stopped. So that was the entire expedition. I could see the workshop door from my splendid new position. For a moment, my gold stripe seemed embarrassingly ambitious. Then a child studied my photograph and asked her grandfather what deliveries had been like before his neighborhood had trucks. He began a story. Another family stopped to listen.

By afternoon, I had carried hats, memories, and more questions than I could count. We would travel the same courtyard path each Saturday, Marisol told a visitor. No mountain passes lay ahead. No faraway harbor awaited my wheels. Yet people were leaning close, discovering places and lives they had never imagined. Eighty yards, I decided, could be a respectable beginning for a grand journey.