Cool

This was my first attempt at a poem that is meant to be read aloud. So go ahead and charm the person next to you with your dramatic reading of it. I hope you enjoy it.

Cool

This summer, I learned cool.

I learned it because I hung with someone different from me,

Someone whose father’s job was playing lottery,

Someone who grew up in SoCal but took themselves to Disneyland when they were nineteen

because they were tired of seeing happiness via widescreen,

Someone who looked at me in the Safeway parking lot and asked, “You’re a virgin?”

My response: “Yes. That surprise you?”

This summer, I learned my family is cool,

Cool because we shingled our own roof and had neighbors stopping by with lemonade,

Cool because we all attend my sister’s bedroom floor tea parties,

Cool because we had a masquerade while we were camping,

Cool because us kids would play baseball in the backyard—

Almost enough of us to play, but not quite,

so we’d just use the person on second when we ran out of batters.

I learned that cool isn’t Fonzie like my mom said it is,

And, second-hand from someone who was the stereotype of cool,

I also learned cool isn’t getting drunk and having a one-night stand,

And threesomes aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

My professor told me he’s never seen a family that is a team,

That faces life like the Avengers upholding each other’s dreams.

It’s sad that the part of my story that I thought was cliché

Is the part that makes it interesting and intriguing and cool—

It’s that sister who’s moved out and Skypes the younger for her birthday.

They have a Play-Doh sculpting competition judged by Mom.

I learned that cool is knowing the rules to Dominion,

Watching meteor showers while lying on a backyard trampoline,

Wearing a friendship bracelet made by my sister,

Knowing how to roast a marshmallow so it looks like the sunset,

And having the patience to stand up to jerks

Coupled with the self-control to not lash back.

And what’s cool about it all isn’t the glamour or the glory or the gold,

Because that stuff isn’t there.

What’s cool is that the life I was born living

is the one a broken Cinderella somewhere is wishing for,

thinking it’s impossible.

But I’m here to tell you it is possible.

That’s not to say we have it all, though,

Because we don’t.

I borrowed my prom dress,

I used fourth-hand skis,

I spent summers doing work outside,

I wore Wal-Mart to a high school that shopped at designer stores,

Every weekend, I helped take care of my great-grandmother from Germany,

And Ben Franklin became my hero because he thought up the lending library.

This summer I learned that Dorothy was right when she said there’s no place like home,

when she abandoned those ruby shoes

And all the fame from Emerald City.

I learned she was right because this summer, I learned about cool.

And it’s family and home and kickin’ it old school.