Sidebar by Ed Quillen
Society – October 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
WARNING
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me,
…
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple
Those are the starting and ending lines of a poem written in 1961 by Jenny Joseph, an English author who was born in 1932 and who continues to create with this year’s publication of Led by the Nose, a book about gardening and smell.
The poem, known variously as “Warning” and “When I am an old woman,” was voted the Nation’s Favorite Poem in a 1996 British Broadcasting Corporation contest.
We published only four lines here because that’s all she allows to be printed; if you want the entire poem, the exclusive American publishing rights are held by Elizabeth Lucas Designs in California, and you can find out more at www.wheniamanoldwoman.com.
A s Marcia Darnell’s story explains, Joseph’s poem inspired the recent proliferation of red hats, but when I first saw a group of women in red hats (at this year’s FIBArk parade in Salida), I thought “Wow, more Linux users.” That’s because the most popular American distribution of that open-source computer operating system is a North Carolina company known as Red Hat Linux, and I’m running it as I type these words (although, for reasons that would matter only to other byteheads, I’m moving to SuSE Linux) .
According to the Internet wikipedia reference, that Red Hat comes not from the poem, but because company founder Marc Ewing wore a Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes) while at college. People would turn to him to solve their computer problems, and he was referred to as “that guy in the red hat.”
–E.Q .
