Being Cool

I have never considered myself as being, “the cool guy.” If being cool meant fitting in, then I definitely did not fit that category. That was one of the advantages of being average or in my case mediocre.

One of the characteristics of being cool back in the day, was smoking cigarettes. It is funny now that I look back, I grew up in a house where both of my parents smoked. My mother smoked Winston cigarettes and my dad smoked a pipe or rolled his own cigarettes.

Almost all of my aunts and uncles smoked and so did a substantial portion of the adults I knew.

Because I was around people smoking so much it is amazing that I didn’t pick up the habit myself. I cannot lie, I tried it as most kids of the era did, however and thankfully I didn’t like it.

I really believe it was Prince Albert tobacco that kept both myself and my brother from smoking, one puff on a Prince Albert rolled cigarette did it for us. We both coughed for an hour after attempting to roll our own and trying to smoke it.

By junior high I had given up on the idea of being cool, it just wasn’t in my blood.

The same thing happened with alcohol. Neither of my parents drank, but again all of my uncles drank, some of them pretty bad. I didn’t like the taste of beer so that one was easy to bypass.

The hard liquor as it is referred to, was a little different. What discouraged me from drinking was more about what I observed.

You see, even as a young person I could see what drinking did to families that I knew, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. So early on I decided to leave that by the wayside.

Now I know some people can drink and have a stable life, however, I’m not so sure that would have been my case. It would take pages and pages to tell you the number of lives that were destroyed by overindulging in alcohol.

I was lucky in one respect because drugs were not as prevalent in my time as they are today. But they were a temptation just the same and one, at the time I decided to stay clear of.

Another reason I avoided being a part of the cool folks, was that I started working in shade tobacco when I was eight years old. The money I made, twelve dollars a week, went to buy my school clothes.

I worked and made my own money all the way through high school. I bought school clothes and later gas for the 1958 English Ford I drove and there wasn’t enough money to go around, even for a pack of cigarettes.

In the end, I guess not being “cool,” probably saved me a lot of heartache over the years and the fact that I am here to write about it.