COOL DUDES AND ME
My favorite piece of music of the late 60’s came out of the throat of Richard Harris who ended the song with, “Didn’t we almost make it this time?” A woeful lament about what might have been.
Although the lyrics are hopelessly romantic (as was I in the 60’s), they kept coming back to me as I worked side by side with a team of twenty-somethings trying to get Barack Obama elected in a flaming red battleground district in central Minnesota. “Making it” to me was not “bringing in the vote,” but getting the nod of approval from these same twenty-somethings.
They were the coolest dudes I had been around since leaving my teen-aged grandchildren the week before who had taught me a little about coolness – pants worn low on the hips, baseball caps worn back to front, sockless and coatless in thirty degree temperatures, bopping to music that was no more than rhythm, and the facial expressions that indicated “what?” “What are you trying to say?” “What does that mean?” “Are you in the same conversation we’re in?” “Where did that come from?”
In fact, “where did that come from?” was actually uttered when I pulled out my 1998 Gateway laptop, the thickness of Dostoyevsky’s War and Peace. I knew then I had to learn the ways of cool if I were to experience any social interaction at all during my stay.
Judging from these five weeks just spent in Minnesota, it ain’t easy being cool. When you are in the darker side of seventy, half-way to eighty, an untoward amount of energy is spent in the attempt. It doesn’t come naturally to curl up in a chair with your legs tucked under your armpits. Well, that’s what it looked like. It doesn’t come naturally to lean against a wall with one foot holding it up, flamingo style, for extended lengths of time. It doesn’t come naturally to eat granola bars for breakfast, pizza for lunch and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner, without a drop of coffee to wash it down. And when a soccer ball comes barreling at you from across the room it doesn’t come naturally to smash it back into the opposing wall. It doesn’t come naturally to whip through fourteen codes to pull up a computer program that completes all your paper work, organizes your life and writes to your mother.
And speaking of mothers, it isn’t cool to have one. I found a ladies’ mission store (not a cool shopping destination) around the corner from the Obama campaign office that sold handmade patchwork quilts. The color combinations were ebullient, the fabrics were cuddly soft, the prices were unconscionabley low. I bought three of them. And I suggested to one twenty-something that it would be a nice gift for his mother. The ensuing silence was accompanied by the above mentioned look. Pause. No, I guess it wouldn’t. “Well, what are you planning to get her for Christmas that would be better?” “Probably a scarf.” A scarf – now in my senior world, that is not cool.
One day the youngest of the twenty-somethings (he may have been nineteen) came into my back office and announced they were going to lunch. Thinking that I had been invited Igave myself a psychic high five. I had made it! Almost made it, as the song goes, because what the young man was looking for was not another companion at lunch, but someone to watch the front office while the gang went off to eat something better than peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
There went a nanosecond of joy following which I pondered what was so good about being cool anyway? Why should I want to be cool? All I really wanted was to be invited out to lunch.
