Cool is as Cool Does

Daily writing prompt

How would you describe yourself to someone who can’t see you?

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I’ve been told that old people are cool because they no longer care if they are cool. It’s the suspension of worry about their coolness which turns around and makes them cool.

I get that. Coolness is not something you can create; you have to wait for it to create you. Still, I liked it today when a stranger coming toward me in a long hall yelled out, “That’s a great haircut!” She said nothing about my new pants, the ones with the super wide legs that take me back to my young-married culotte days. Like, “Hey! Those are some great-looking pants!” That would have been too much. Suspicious, you know? You can’t tell a stranger that you like multiple things about them just passing by.

Sometimes, when I am going into a place that is scary – say a big meeting or an encounter with an unpleasant person, I say in my head, “Be your tallest self.” When I do that, I am less tall than I was in the middle of my career, a full two inches shorter, so I end up looking people in the eye who I’d rather tower over. But since coolness is pretty much an abstraction rather than a quantifiable state, it doesn’t matter. Being my tallest self is an instant infusion of cool, an unconscious elevation, if you will.

There are other tools of cool, accoutrements. Like my giant silver hoop earrings. I wear them places where I hope people will be astonished that such an old woman is wearing such big earrings. Another old woman I know walked across a big room, her eyes fixed on my big earrings and said, “Those are the most striking earrings I’ve seen in a long time.” She is exceedingly cool herself, so it felt like she was embracing me as a very cool sister.

Us cool folks can spot other cool folks a mile away.