I wish I had a photoooo of Batty wearing her cute little white feathered pillbox hat. I will guess that one might even exist somewhere in the universe, maybe even in the hatbox she kept her old photooos in. But I don’t have it. One of the many things that you could say about Batty was that she was married to an Air Force officer, colonel in the last few years of his career. They were stationed all over the place until he retired and they built a ski chalet on the shores of Gitchee Gumee. Duke died in 1983 (alas) but Batty lived a very vibrant life until 2009.

Anyway. I don’t know what it’s like to be married to an Air Force officer now. Back when Duke was an officer, there were all kinds of affairs that required the officers’ wives to dress veddy veddy proppa-ly. Back in those days that meant hats and probably even gloves. (Heck, I even had white gloves when I was a little kid. For church and weddings and things. Yes, I hated them.) After Duke retaarrrred and he and Batty built their chalet, the white feather hat only came out after a leetle wee bit o’ whine. Or whatever. At that time of her life (and until the end), Batty was an Amazon woman. She was much more interested in death marches through the wilderness than participating in teas and things, although being an extreme extrovert, she managed those things too. (I wish I had even just a leetle bit of that extreme extrovert DNA.) Batty was always a beautiful elegant woman but all of us, who weren’t familiar with fancy air force parties and teas and things could never quite reconcile the presence of that particular hat on Radical Batty’s head in her Amazon woman years. And so all of us, including Batty herself, would be rolling on the floor laughing our you-know-whats off. And trying the hat on. All of us looking as ridiculous as we could possibly look. And once, very very very long ago, something about Lazy Bob’s was involved in the whole thing but I don’t even want to go there now. Because we are all now responsible adults. Roight? Snort.

I don’t have a photooo of the white pillbox feather hat but I do have this wizard type photooo from Batty’s birthday in 2006. I think it was 2006. I think it was the June after my old coot died (and my little brother before him…). And I was at loose ends with grown up children and no job or anything constructive to do but one day I picked up Batty’s daughter Uber Kayak Woman (my cuzzint) at Daytwa Metro and we drove north and somehow my life got sparked into beginning again…

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