At
this time in my life, going into fifth grade, I started wanting to be
cool. Cool, I think is a combination of nature and nurture, and being
a child of nerds who was intermittently home schooled I was naturally
a shoe-in. One thing I had deduced with my not inconsiderable powers
of cool observation was that all the cool kids had cool clothes and I
didn't so in a all time classic misunderstanding of cause and
correlation I decided to get some cool clothes. The big problem was
that my parents did not share my aspirations in the sense of
financially supporting them. I saved up my own allowance and money I
earned doing jobs and selling stuff and at the end of summer made
arrangements with my mom to go shopping for school clothes not at a
thrift store. My mom took me to a stylish department store she knew
off called K-mart. She was right on the money too, the place had
really nice clothes that, in my opinion, looked really, really cool.
One little ensemble that looked really good to me was a two tone
green stripped shirt and short matching set with orange trim inside
the sleeves and cuffs which was designed be rolled over to create a
nice contrasting color band at all of my limb-holes. It also had a
surfing related screen printed image and copy that made the whole
thing pop. A classic sharp look that would hopefully insert me
seamlessly into the jet set of my sometime elementary school. The
plan was sound. Except it was smothered in it infancy by some rich
kids. The saddest part to me in retrospect was how very lower middle
class the kids I thought were rich were. Some kids from across town
by which I mean four blocks away, the town was very small, invited my
friend Ben and I to play some football. The new clothes were working
already, these were cool kids and they wanted to play with me. My
plan was working. We went over to the new elementary school and there
were a lot of bigger boys there seventh graders and stuff which made
me a little nervous but I was there to make entry into the
upper-crust of Santaquin society so playing football with seventh
graders would just be the price I had to pay. We chose up teams and I
was chosen last as was my tradition, so I wasn't jumping off
completely from my old life. Baby steps. We got ot playing and
everything was going fairly well and then a seventh grader kid
tackled me by grabbing the precious collar of my new shirt and it
ripped wide open. It tore almost in half and was barely hanging on
me. The boy thought tearing my shirt off was the funniest thing he
had seen all day and he and his friends were laughing at me and
misfortune. It took all of my powers of self control to not break
down and start crying as I gathered my tatters in my hand and walked
home. When I was out of range then I started crying. I tried to mend
the shirt but given the severity of the damage and my rudimentary
understanding of sewing doomed my efforts. That may have single
handedly derailed my efforts of being cool in the fifth grade. The
shirt was central, that shirt was the key. But I had to have my mom
buy me regular nerd clothes because my money was all gone.
