Does Cool Fade?

by Crazy Ivan

When I was in Tennessee, I met an old man that was a real talker.  I'd already taught his granddaughters how to play so while they're with mom picking out colors, he struts up and starts chatting with me about their vacation.  He tells me about their cabin and about the dinner theater they'd gone to the night before.  Then he tells me about his fateful horseback riding incident.

"I was riding the horse, you see, when I started to lose my balance.  My right foot was wedged in the stirrup pretty good and I tried to free it as I was falling, but it was no use.  I flopped over one side with my foot caught in the other."

"Wow," I said with complete credulity.  "Are you okay now?"

"Yeah, luckily for me at about that time the Wal-Mart manager came out and he unplugged it."

It took me a second.  Bones had caught the punchline quicker than me and started cracking up and only then did I put the whole joke together.  I guess he'd drawn me in with how seriously he presented the set up.  We all had a good laugh, his family bought a two pack and two singles and I had a good story to tell for the rest of the day.

But as I reflect on that story I can't help but think of some of the other really cool grandpas and grandmas I met over the summer.  And it occurs to me to wonder (since I'm getting old), why do cool grandparents stick out in my mind so much?  Surely I've met millions of grandparents by now.  I meet cool moms and dads and they stick in my memory as well, but not as much as cool grandparents.

This seemingly innocent line of thought actually got me worried this morning.  I started to consider the possibility that the reason I remember cool grandpas and grandmas is because they're a rarer occurrence.  It makes perfect sense, I suppose.  I meet cool kids by the truckloads.  For every, say, 10 or so cool kids I meet, I meet about 1 or 2 cool parents.  And then for every 10 or so cool parent I meet, I meet a cool grandpa or grandma.  Would it be completely insane to assume that means that coolness fades as you get older?

Well, I guess there is another possible explanation; I just meet more kids than parents and more parents than grandparents.  The nature of my job pretty much demands that.  I mean, usually when I'm teaching a kid how to play Myachi, there's a mom or dad nearby, but sometimes they hang back and look at something else and sometimes there's one mom for 5 kids.

So to answer this question, I think we're going to have to get at least a little bit scientific.  We've got to define cool.

Normally this would probably be really hard.  I don't think that everybody in the country could ever agree on what it actually means to be "cool", and even if they could they probably couldn't quantify it.  And that's what we need.  We need a way to assign a number to coolness so that we can compare the relative coolness of people at different ages.

Luckily for me, I'm gonna bypass the hard part, though.  I'm not worried about how the country defines "cool", I'm worried about how a Myachi Master defines "cool".  And that's actually pretty easy: How willing are you to try something new?

That's pretty much it.  For my purposes, if you're willing to try something new and have fun with it, you're cool.  If you're willing to look kind of silly in public because you're busy having fun and not caring what you look like, you're cool.  If you're willing to embrace the curve balls life throws at you, you're cool.

And when you put it like that, I think the answer is both sad and obvious.  Cool definitely fades as you get older.  Think about it, a really young kid is pretty much trying new stuff every time they walk out the door.  Everything's pretty much new to you, so you have no choice but to embrace it.  As we get older, far too many of us start carving out niches.  "I'm good at this kind of stuff but not that kind of stuff," or something like that.

And when I look back on the coolest parents and coolest grandparents I've met, the common trait between them was their willingness to try something new and have fun.  They were willing to be bad at it (and some of them were) and eager to be good at it (and most of them were) but one way or the other, they were embracing the moment and enjoying what life was giving them.

So in closing, if I had to boil this whole long winded post into something a little more digestible, I could do it in one sentence: Stay cool; life's more fun that way.