As I finished junior high (7th-9th grade) and ventured into high school, it became even more obvious to me that there was a fairly clear distinction between really cool kids and almost cool kids and not cool kids. I realized by this time that I was somewhere in the middle group and that my chances of ever being rally cool were not great. Really cool was Jay Wilkinson (the son of Oklahoma football coaching legend, Bud Wilkinson), who was good looking, quarterback of the football team and rode a Cushman Eagle to school ( I rode my Schwinn bicycle and was first chair trombone in the band - not really cool). I had several really good friends and lots of acquaintances, but none of my friends were really cool either. some of the really cool people were friendly and would actually talk to us and say "Hi" in the hallway and that made us feel a little closer to really cool. But in the end we thought that they were cool and we were almost (but never ever really going to be) cool.
When my family moved from Oklahoma to New Mexico in the summer after my sophomore year of high school, I was devastated. I was leaving the kids (really cool and almost cool) that I had gone to school with from the second grade on. And I was moving to the middle of nowhere to a new school where I would be the new kid in town and have even less chance to be really cool and maybe a chance to be not cool. As it turned out, Portales, New Mexico is a very small college town as compared to Norman. And where as in Norman, I was the son oa a college associate professor in a large university, in Portales I was the son of a full professor who became the Academic Dean of a much smaller university. Because of this difference I was regarded as a much bigger fish in a smaller pond and began a journey which ended with my being one of the really cool kids in Portales High and later Eastern New Mexico University (in my opinion, of course, looking back). And it didn't hurt my coolness that I found my first girlfriend, also cool and went "steady" through the rest of high school (young love can blind feelings of uncoolness).
However, thinking you are really cool and believing it can are totally different. Graduating as covaledictorian, going off to medical school, training for pediatrics at one of the country’s best children’s hospitals, developing the leading pediatric practice in my area – these are all things that a really cool person would do. And I developed a costume that looked like I was a really cool person and I had a beautiful wife and wonderful kids like a really cool person would. But believing it would take quite a while and another journey.
In 1987, Dr. McDreamy (Patrick Dempsey) starred
in one of his earliest films which to me was like a
story of my past. The plot of the movie stated,
“Ronald Miller is tired of being a nerd and makes a
deal with one of the most popular girls in school
to help him break into the “cool” clic. He offers her
a thousand dollars to pretend to be his girlfriend for
a month. It succeeds, but he soon learns that the
price of popularity may be higher than expected.”
It wasn’t until later in the mid 90s that I finally figured
out the whole “cool” thing, and that will be the content
for another blog entry.
