The Cool Kid

As alluded to previously, the coolest person in my household happens to be the youngest, 5-year-old Casey.

I suppose as a parent there should just be a supposition that at the very least the kids are going to think that they're cooler than you. I'm sure that part is true no matter who we're talking about. In a couple of years, the horde of kids that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have taken on will, I'm sure, consider themselves both smarter and cooler than their parents (and they could be half right).

My problem with this is that everyone believes that Casey is the coolest member of our family. I'm at least a marginally accomplished person. I've lived in L.A. I've been around celebrities. The above-mentioned Mr. Pitt once almost ran over me in his SUV. I write about sports. I've been on staff at the very hip webzine, 2Walls.

And, Amy was an officer in the Air Force, dealing with things like missiles and satellites. In some quarters, that would be considered pretty cool.

Marty, his older brother, started trying to write his own books when he was three. So, at some point there's a decent chance that he'll grow into his own coolness, say around the time that he's hitting college.

But, no, Casey holds the title of coolest.

As near as I can figure it, it's because the rest of us have some kind of stress, anxiety and/or social disorder. I'm not going to entirely say that Casey doesn't have any of that -- he's got my genes, has to have some -- but for some reason it doesn't affect him the same way.

He's always been this way, too. When he was 2-years-old, I would have him out at a store and people would walk by and say 'hi' to him by name. People that I had never seen before. When he got a little bit older and it would happen, I started asking, "Who was that?" The only response that I ever got was, "Oh, that's my friend."

Once at a local Memorial Day celebration, Amy and Casey went and sat in an open area. Suddenly, a couple of kids saw Casey and came over to sit with him. The next thing my wife knew, she was surrounded by kids that she didn't know.

It's gotten to the point that when he was four, we were at a Cubs game in Chicago and had parked by DePaul University. As we were going to our car on a late Friday afternoon, Casey started to wander into the open door of a just starting college party. We rushed to grab him, not so much because we were worried about his safety. No, we were worried that if he got inside the college kids would ask the rest of us to leave, but would let Casey stay.

At his godmother's hip Hollywood wedding in Texas (side note: entertainment industry weddings are hardly ever actually in Los Angeles. It's just one of those things.), we couldn't find Casey. Not in any sort of stress inducing way, we just weren't sure where he had gotten to. As we were talking about it, who comes sauntering out of the middle of the dance floor in search of a bottle of water? That's right, as a preschooler, he was already acting like he was out at a club.

He walks into sporting arenas bobbing his head along to hip-hop music that he's never heard before. He slumps on the couch eating pizza and playing video games as though this were his off-campus apartment. He walks up to people in stores and strikes up conversations. When a girl says hi to him, and you teasingly ask if that's his girlfriend, the response is usually, "No, but she wants to marry me." When he tries on clothes at Old Navy, he blends in with the manequins.

There's nothing that you can really do about it. I'm not really sure what happens with cool kids. I have no personal experience to draw upon. I don't know what cool kids grow up to be. The only aspiration that we've been able to get out of Casey thus far is that he wouldn't mind being rich.

My only real hope at this point is that by the time he's a teenager, he'll be able to help us get into restaurants that we might otherwise have trouble getting seated in. Then again, I guess there's alway the possibility that they'll just seat him and leave the other three of us standing behind the velvet rope. I would love to say that he would never leave us behind, but that would be untrue. Truth is he finds our lack of coolness a little unseemly.

Eventually, I'll get used to the fact that the little one fancies himself a modern-day Fonzie but it probably won't be any time soon.