REMEMBERING WHEN: We were cool. What happened??

By Keith Schell

Back in high school, we either thought we were cool or were desperately trying to be. In reality, we were just a bunch of insecure, awkward kids entering adulthood, trying to act cool, funny, or desirable to the opposite sex. But many of us were generally too scared to actually interact with them in any meaningful way. Some kids dated, and some didn’t.

When I went off to college, I thought everything would change, but all I found were other students in my new classes trying to be cool as well. Using the example of the ‘Happy Days’ TV sitcom, I was hoping to find coolness, but I was definitely never ‘Fonzie’ cool because my regular uncool self always kept getting in the way. I was more like ‘Richie’ cool, which was really not cool at all! Instead of a motorbike, which I would be too chicken to ride anyway, I had a second-hand car. Instead of a black leather jacket, I bought a blue leather college jacket with the name of my college on the back, only to later discover that the jacket I bought was the last jacket the student store had left in my size, and it was only still there because it was last year’s style! Not exactly the epitome of cool.

The old land yacht I drove back and forth to college back then just had an uncool AM-FM radio in it, so a buddy of mine came out to our house one weekend to show me how to install my brand new eight-track tape player underneath the dashboard and hook it up to the two stereo speakers we put in the back window of my car. Now we’re approaching cool! When I stuck my first 8-track tape in that player and my favourite rock ‘n roll tunes started blaring out, I thought I was the King of Cool as I drove down the highway heading back to college. Little did I know.

But as you get older, the battle to stay cool is generally a losing one.

When my youngest brother got married, he was no help to maintaining coolness whatsoever. When he and his wife had kids, they bought the ultimate automotive symbol of uncool: the minivan. Very necessary for hauling a growing family around, but still very uncool.

Once, on a family visit to his place, I went out one afternoon cruising with my brother in his minivan (we actually had to go to the store to get some milk), and he said to me, “How about some tunes along the way?”

COOL! Let’s get this van a-rockin’! So he took out a rock and roll CD, popped it in the player, and cranked up the music. Maybe there was some hope here for coolness after all.

It was only when the song started playing that I realized that the only CDs he had in his kid-friendly minivan were the Sesame Street versions of famous rock and roll songs! We were rockin’ down the road loud and proud to the song ‘Letter B’, the Sesame Street version of the famous Beatles song, ‘Let it be’. Sigh. I don’t think the babes were very impressed with us when they saw us rolling up to the stoplight.

In one particular episode of ‘The Simpsons’, Abe Simpson hit the coolness issue right on the head: In a flashback sequence when a teenage Homer told his dad he had lost his cool and wasn’t ‘with it’ anymore, Abe replied, “I used to be ‘with it’. And then ‘it’ changed! Suddenly, what I was with wasn’t ‘it’ and what was ‘it’ was weird and scary!” And then he pointed a finger at teenage Homer and warned him, “IT’LL HAPPEN TO YOU!”

And it did. It happened to all of us.

So why did it happen?

The simple answer is: because we grew up. As soon as you become an adult and begin to assume adult responsibilities, you lose whatever cool you have left. The moment you start to become more concerned about how your lawn looks over how your hair looks, you have finally lost the last of your cool.

I don’t want to be uncool! But over time, like the gradual erosion of a rock face by a running stream, your coolness leaves you bit by bit as you age. If possible, I’d like to try to keep a little bit of coolness as I get older. I don’t want to be the old guy in the neighbourhood who the kids run up to my door, ring the bell, and run away! (But I guess it could be worse. At least there haven’t been any flaming bags of dog doody on my front doorstep on Halloween.)

Nowadays, I just want peace and quiet. Quiet gatherings are fine, but I don’t like the neighbors having loud parties in their backyard. And I sometimes watch ‘Vision TV’, the unofficial ‘Old Fogey’ station of Canadian television (Moses Znaimer can dress up his Zoomer station all he wants, but it’s still uncool ‘Old Fogey’ TV and I’m happy watching that).

Okay, I finally admit it: in reality, I was never cool. I was just me. And it’s getting worse as I get older. Most of my life I was just kind of the ‘Switzerland of cool’, neutrally straddling the fence of cool with the pinky toe of one foot in the land of coolness and the other foot completely stuck in the quagmire of total nerd-dom!

So, I guess the moral of the story is this: if you have to be something, the best thing you can ultimately be is to be yourself. In Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’, Polonius once said to his son Laertes, “To thine own self be true”. And he was absolutely right. Being yourself is the only way to go.

Later, uncool cats! I’m going to go and watch Vision TV.

And like me, if you’re never going to be cool, just do the best you can.