I'm usually the only Dad who attends the monthly PTO meetings, and my ethnicity makes me stand out even more. When I introduced myself to the Principal at my first PTO meeting about a year ago, we got to talking about how we both ended up in our small town in Oklahoma.
Fast forward to a few months back, when we got to talking one night after a PTO Chicken Noodle dinner fundraiser and had a good laugh when we found out we spent some time in the same town in the San Gabriel Valley.
Seems his Dad lived in the town where I had moved my family from, and he attended high school there, before moving out to Hemet with his Mom. During college, he came out to Oklahoma on a football scholarship and never looked back.
We bonded over memories of pastrami dips at The Hat, Tommy's chili burgers on Rampart at midnight, and Double-double's (animal style) at the In N Out by the high school on Rosemead Blvd.
The next week I found an In N Out windshield decal mailed to me anonymously. It went on the Elky.
I escalated by sending him a Tommy's tee shirt, anonymously of course.
He tells me he wears it with pride on weekend family outings.
Since then, I find him seeking me out at the monthly Parent/Teacher Organization gatherings, where we strangely find ourselves saying "dude" way too often.
So now, not every day, but just about every day when I drop C off at school, I toss one of those quick raised-eyebrow, head-jerking, half-smile greeting nods that only guys do, to the Tommy's T-shirt wearing Principal at C's school.
C is not impressed.
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Kids just don't appreciate the (ha, I just did one of those 'quick raised-eyebrow, head-jerking, half-smile greeting nods that only guys do' things to the mailroom guy that just walked by my office), "cool" things we learned to do in the 60's and 70's. Those things have far more meaning than any rendition of some gangsta' rap that can be heard several blocks away and coming from a '78 Caprice Classic with bicycle tires and a set of hydraulics that bounce the front of the car a clean 3 feet in the air.
I remember words and phases like ‘Dude’, ‘psychedelic’, and ‘oh, that’s Boss’. In fact, I still frequent the realm of 60’s vocabulary when attempting to communicate the very essence of my being… ‘COOL’!
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