COOL AT LAST [F, 7-1-22]

 

We finally got around to using our OG gift card. [Olive Garden, not Old Gangster] We’ve had that card for a long, long time, because the OG is across the great divide, that being I-69. That mighty road divides Bloomington with an intersection that makes people move to Los Angeles for easier driving. It takes me a long time to get up the courage to cross the great divide.

I ordered online for curbside pick-up. In return, the OG web site told me to park in one of the appropriate spots and “A To Go Specialist will bring your order to you.”

Wow! “A To Go Specialist!” What a cool title. I wish I’d had a cool title like that when I was a kid with tattoos and a nose ring and purple hair. [Those seem to be the qualifications.]

It would have made my first job so much easier had people called me “A Detasseling Specialist.” I’m sure those old hens would have stopped pecking my hands [early forms of tattoos] if my title had been “Egg Gathering Specialist.”

I just wasn’t cool. Not like a “To Go Specialist.” Or Benny Albin.

He was a senior when I was a freshman at Oakland City High School. I wanted to be cool like Benny. He was smart and good-looking. He was a starter on the basketball team. Most importantly, he was Editor of the Oak Barks school newspaper.

His other qualities were beyond my possibilities, but I was the freshman reporter on that school newspaper, and figured that by the time I was a senior, I could be the editor of Oak Barks.

In the meantime, during lunch periods, when Benny was mocking up the newspaper in Mr. Morrow’s typing room, I would join him for lessons in cool. Occasionally, he would say, “McFarland, I need two column inches to complete page two. Write something.” So, all the school events already covered, I would write some lame opinion piece, about how students should be more patriotic, or a human-interest bit, about the natural violence of chickens. It was pretty bad stuff, but it filled up the space, so that when the typing staff came in to put the pages onto the plasticized nitrocellulose stencils, they were ready to go. [Can you imagine a cool person describing the stencils that way?]

Of course, Benny did fail me that one time. I’ve written about it before. I wanted to ask Jeanette Richardson to go to the junior class play with me. Benny drilled me for many noon hours on how to do that, coolly. “If she says this, you say that, etc.” The one thing he did not think to tell me was what to do if she said, “Why?” Which she did. I can’t remember what I said or did. I think I just ran off and avoided her for the next four years. I did know that I would never be cool.

But, “never” is a long time. Last month, Helen and I were asked to tell the kids at VBS what St. Mark’s UMC was like, back in medieval times, when we were the first couple married there. The program listed us simply as “Cool People to Know.”

John Robert McFarland

There was one especially cool thing about that experience. As we talked to the kids, we sat in exactly the same spot in the old, old part of the building, what was then the sanctuary and is now part of the pre-school, where we stool sixty-three years ago to exchange our vows.