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My favorite umbrella has been a large, black golf umbrella. It is big enough to cover me in the rain even if the wind is blowing a bit. Even after the tab that keeps it closed fell out, I just used the Velcro strap to wrap around it to keep it closed. Recently, one end cap snapped off of the rib (so that the fabric wasn’t taut right there), but it was still perfectly functional. This past week, however, I had to put “large umbrella” on my birthday list because it broke in a new way.
At first, I didn’t realize it had a new flaw when I grasped it tightly in a rain storm last week while walking from my car to my building downtown. I quickly realized something was amiss, though, when I felt water dripping onto my head even though it was completely under the umbrella. Looking up I noticed my umbrella now had a sunroof! The “wind cap” that is the extra disk of fabric that sits on the very top of the umbrella and overlaps the larger umbrella fabric had separated from the main umbrella fabric and was happily flapping in the breeze. This left an opening right in the middle of the umbrella, rendering it somewhat less useful as a rain repellent. I tried to spin the umbrella around so that the wind would blow that flap of fabric down instead of up, but the swirling wind around the buildings downtown made this impossible.
I tried gluing the cap back onto the umbrella, but it did not hold. It really needed to be sewn to repair it properly, but given my lack of sewing skills and its other signs of age, I didn’t bother to try that repair. So for the next month or two, I’ll be using my emergency backup umbrella I keep at my desk at work: a Houston Astros umbrella I got at a game this past year. It’s actually a fairly decent umbrella for being free, but it’s not nearly the size of the umbrella its replacing.