A Tot’s Cold Shot Gives Formerly Cool Dude the Big Chill

While visiting out-of-town friends last week, their two young daughters hauled me into the TV room to watch “Grease.” It was easy duty, because I love both girls and, at 6 and 8, almost everything they say or do entertains me.

Example: Six-year-old Caroline had gone with her mother the day before Easter Sunday to have breakfast with the local Peter Rabbit. Mistakenly assuming it was breakfast with the Easter Bunny himself, I asked when she got home, “Oh, did you get to meet the Easter Bunny?”

“No,” she replied, matter-of-factly, “this was a different fake bunny.”

With lines like that, any wonder why I’m a sucker when they want me for company?

So, we’re watching “Grease” on Easter Sunday, and all seems right with the world. The girls are enjoying the singing and dancing, and to my relief the movie’s double-entendres are sailing over their heads. No need for me to manufacture on-the-spot phony definitions. Instead, at appropriate moments, I need only gently explain such things as why they shouldn’t give in to peer pressure when they’re teenagers and why acting “cool” isn’t always a good thing.

At which point 8-year-old Elizabeth turns and asks, “Did you used to be cool?”

Did you used to be cool?

Have you ever heard the sound of the last bit of ego, built up and nurtured over a lifetime, escaping from the body of a 48-year-old man?

It’s not a pleasant sound. It begins as a low rumbling deep inside, ricocheting off the vital organs before emerging as a prolonged mournful wail, not unlike that of a hound baying at the distant moon. The death rattle of my own cool began in that comfortable TV room, rolled off the sofa and out the front door and down the street, spewed across the Midwestern plains and vanished into the air.

Instead of something blowing into town, this was something blowing out of town. A reverse tornado, but just as whimsical and devastating. Me demolished; her sister, no more than five feet away, unharmed.

And then, just like that, silence. In the time it took a child to utter six words, the cool was gone. As if it never existed.

Did you used to be cool?

Indeed, my child.

How to explain to an 8-year-old how cool one used to be? Obviously, this pathetic lump of sagging flesh, sallow skin and outdated clothing she now is looking at is not cool--she has made that abundantly clear--but how to demonstrate to her how different things used to be?

She could be told about cutting a pretty mean rug once upon a time. She could be told that I never once wore chains during the Disco Era. A handful of friends--those who knew the old boy 20 years or so ago--could have been telephoned and pressed to talk to her, but who’s to say she would have believed them?

If only she’d phrased it differently. “When did you first notice that you were cool?” would have been acceptable. Or, “Why do you say that being cool isn’t always a good thing?”

Anything but, “Did you used to be cool?”

Besides, hadn’t I been cool that very morning while helping her and her sister and brother look for Easter eggs? Did it mean nothing to her as we watched “Grease” that I knew the lyrics to the songs?

Did she expect me to say, “Yes, I used to be cool.” That would prompt the rather obvious follow-up question of when I ceased to be so.

Or was she expecting, “No, I was never cool.” That would have disappointed her even more than her current state of affairs, in which she found herself in the presence of The Uncool One.

She is oblivious to such nuances. She is in second grade and surrounded by cool people all day long. She knows cool when she sees it. Why patronize the family visitor and pretend he has it, when she can see so clearly he does not?

If only she hadn’t been so earnest, so straightforward in her curiosity: Had I, at any point in my life, ever been cool?

Someday, I will explain to her why that can never be a yes-or-no question.

At that moment in the TV room, though, the utter unexpectedness of the question, perhaps coupled by her short attention span and the ongoing saga of the movie, spared me from having to answer. It was a question asked but not answered.

It is not a question soon to be forgotten, however.

Did you used to be cool?

Is there anything more endearing than the honest inquiry of a child?

Until very recently, I thought not.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com