Feeling alienated? Isolated? Wish your kids had the benefit of extended family? Now you won’t! Bob Christy will serve the purpose of  those elder relatives/extended family who tell stories about their childhoods. He’ll tranquilize warm your hearts with stories about how it was growing up in the good, old days in a good, old Mayberry-style place (where all the houses were custom builds and the streets were paved…oh, no, not that…actually, the boys just wore cardigans and weejuns.)

The Cool Girl

(Part one)

By Robert J. Christy

Around 7th grade my friends and I began to really notice girls, especially older girls. Those in the 8th and 9th grades were particularly eye catching for all sorts of reasons I will let you guess on your own. There was one girl I was attracted to, an 8th grader who looked like a 13-year-old Kim Novak (note: Kim Novak was a hottie actress, especially from the late 1950s through the late 1970s). Well, this 8th grader who looked like Kim Novak, was new in school, very cool and didn’t run in a pack like the other girls. She wasn’t part of the clique of girls who tried to set the standards for the rest of the 8th graders. She was an outsider and didn’t seem to care. One night at a junior high YMCA Party, I was standing around with my friends, not dancing, afraid to talk to any of the girls. When a lady’s choice was announced, Cool Girl walked over to me, took my hand and gently brought me out to the dance floor. The song was “Dream” by the The Everly Brothers (note: these brothers would be sort of like the grandparents of The Jonas Brothers). Cool Girl snuggled up to me and we danced like the teenagers on American Bandstand. Only we danced slower and much closer. She was very cute, she smelled really, really good and her warm breath on my neck drove me crazy. We never spoke, but when the song was over she looked me in the eye and said, “I need you to walk me home. I’ll meet you in the lobby when the party is over.”

I proudly sauntered back to my friends, who immediately began to lay it on me: “You looked like an ass out there!” “She must be blind, dancing with a skinny dick like you!” “You dance like you’ve got a stick up your ass!” etc., etc.

I didn’t say a word, I just stared across the dance floor at Cool Girl and she stared at me; it was like we were alone in that gymnasium. The next lady’s choice came and one of my classmates asked me to dance. I looked at Cool Girl and she smiled and nodded, so I danced with a girl I’d know since kindergarten. For the entire song I felt like I was cheating on Cool Girl. I’d look at her and she would look back at me and with a glance let me know it was okay.

At 9 o’clock the dance was over. I split from my friends and walked over to Cool Girl waiting in the lobby of the Y, she took my hand and we left the building. My friends were slack-jawed, girls I’d known for years were staring at me, older guys acknowledged me for the first time since school had started that fall. Here I was with a beautiful older girl, leaving a party, alone. Everyone else was in groups; guys with guys, girls with girls and some groups of guys and girls…nobody was alone except for Cool Girl and me!

It was a perfect fall night and, as we walked, Cool Girl linked her arm in mine and held my hand at the same time. I learned that she was the daughter of an Air Force Colonel, our school was her fourth in eight years and she’d recently moved from Japan to the base close to my North Dakota hometown. She told me she thought I was the best looking boy in the school and she didn’t care if I was younger than she was. She told me she really liked me and she needed somebody to teach her to ice skate, take her to the movies, hang out with her after school. She told me she didn’t need to have any girlfriends since her older sister provided all the girly things she needed in her life. She didn’t really want to try to break into the cliques and get involved with the girls in her class, she said she just needed one friend and she had picked me for the job. Needless to say, I accepted the assignment.

When we arrived at her house, I met her mom, dad (a hard-ass jet jockey) and her fabulous 16-year-old sister. We drank sodas, ate some pie and her dad gave me a ride home and asked to meet my parents. My folks were having a dinner party that night and I brought the Colonel in, introduced him to Mom, Dad and their friends. The Colonel and my old man immediately hit it off (Dad had been a pilot in WW2). Apparently, we all passed the Colonel’s muster because he invited me to dinner on Sunday.

After the Sunday dinner, Cool Girl and I went down to the recreation room in the basement to listen to records. She and her sister were huge Elvis fans (you don’t need a hyperlink to Elvis for God’s sakes, right?) and we listened to a stack of Elvis 45’s, both sides twice! Just before I had to leave, she kissed me. This was not a fumbling little junior high girl kiss, either. I was speechless. She kissed me again and I started to follow her lead and for 10 minutes we sat there wrapped around each other kissing like long lost lovers. The spell was broken when her sweet Southern mom (think Paula’s Kitchen on food channel) called down the stairs saying, “Sugah,, it’s ah school naught and that sweet boy’s Mama wants heem home soon!”

I staggered the 12 blocks home, my body buzzing and my head spinning with love, affection and hormones. I slapped my hands on stop signs all the way! That night when I fell into bed I believed I was the luckiest, happiest and coolest kid in America. Now, if you want to find out what ended up happening with Cool Girl, you’ll have to wait for our next chat.

P.S. (mainly, for fashionistas and aficionados of vintage clothing)

That first night is so burned into my memory, I can recall exactly what Cool Girl and I were wearing:

She wore a dark green Bobbie Brooks sweater, cardigan and skirt set, black flats and a single pearl on a silver chain around her neck. I had on grey flannel slacks, a white button-down shirt and burgundy crewneck sweater. I wore Bass Weejuns and the watch my dad gave me before school started (He thought I would look pretty stupid wearing my Hopalong Cassidy watch in junior high!) .

Robert J. Christy says his heart is in the city of Boston, where he used to live. But we think it’s in North Dakota. Bob is the general manager of 92.7 JILL FM, a suburban Los Angeles radio station.

Keep It A Small World

Buy Local

By Larry Dutra
Last week, I was reading the Los Angeles Times (yes, a real newspaper!) and was surprised to learn that one of the best-selling “albums” in the country had not been released yet as a CD. On the strength of downloads alone, the Decemberists’ The Hazards of Love had cracked the Top 20. This is more evidence of paradigm-shifting, market-shaping forces occurring with startling velocity. Heck, my first sentence here managed to reference three things (newspapers, albums and CDs) that will likely be relics in a few short years.

In the wake of our historic economic downturn, much has been written about the impact on American’s purchasing behavior. We are widely reported to be consuming less. I would characterize this as a reflex to market conditions that we can’t control. For some, the reflex is involuntary; they want to spend but they’ve lost their jobs and, thus, no longer have money. For others, the reflex not to spend is probably largely fear-based. But, given that consuming less is indeed reflexive one way or the other, logic would also suggest that our consumptive behavior will roar back when the economic winds turn and our fear subsides. If so, there would be no long-term fundamental change in our consumer mentality. If that’s the case, it would be too bad. I’m a realist, though, and I know that we have short memories. Note how sales of hybrid cars, which were all the rage when gas was $4 a gallon, have dramatically cooled. Last month, Toyota’s sales numbers showed a 55 percent decline for the Prius brand since March ’08. Yes, fewer people are buying any type of car perhaps but I also think Prius sales have stalled because the price of gas is back down to the $2 range.

Even given our fickleness, though, I am not entirely pessimistic that real consumer change can take place. For in addition to being forced to consume less currently, many of us have been voluntarily consuming differently. Take my examples of downloaded music, and the demise of newsprint in favor of online content. Consider how vastly more environmentally friendly those distribution mechanisms are for the ecology of our planet. For the delivery of music, a plastic disc, plastic case and the cost of fuel to transport it (and the consumer) to a retail store is replaced by bits and bytes of digital music being carried over the Internet to your MP3 player. (If you were to purchase that same CD from Amazon, the fuel and exhaust from your personal vehicle would be replaced by the UPS truck.) While I love reading the daily paper, the environmentalist in me sees the extraordinary waste in a delivery system that begins with clear-cutting trees, ends with private delivery via automobile and in between generates no small amount of toxic waste. But the emergence of these highly efficient new distribution mechanisms (which may lead to the demise of conventional music and newspaper delivery) have been driven more by convenience and personal preference. The environmental benefits are bonuses that just happen to come along with the package.

Out there beyond changes in consumer behavior generated by economic sanctions and/or motivated by new technology and convenience is also a whole new emerging set of changes that we are making more deliberately and more consciously.
The public’s growing concerns about carbon footprints, toxic substances finding their way into our food supply and packaged goods have engendered a whole new discussion about not only consuming less, but consuming differently. This new paradigm shows us not only how we can consume less, but also how we can consume more intelligently so as to conserve resources and improve the quality of life on our crowded planet. The key is a more keen awareness of where and how what we consume is produced.

There may be no better example of this than how we shop for the food we eat, since there is no indication that we’ll be able to download our dinner from the Internet, at least not in our lifetime. Let’s say you are shopping for fruit. You are presented with a plentiful choice of fruits from all over the world. Choice is good. But not all choices are equally good for our country, or our planet. Although the exact numbers are subject to debate, there is a difference, in terms of environmental impact, between the cost of an orange imported to the U.S. from Australia in the off-season versus an in-season apple from Washington State. Just consider the shipping. Transporting the produce from the southern hemisphere (by jet or container ship) is geometrically more environmentally costly than from the Pacific Northwest. And, besides, purchasing produce from elsewhere supports a grower in a foreign country over a grower in our own. If your quest for oranges leads you to a farmer’s market patronizing a grower near your home, that’s even better. Researchers at the Iowa State University have reported that food miles associated with grocery store items are 27 times higher than those for goods bought from local sources such as farmer’s markets.

This same way of thinking can be extended to virtually everything we consume at the market: beer, wine, cheese, meat – even bottled water (though I don’t advocate consuming bottled water).

First and foremost, consume less (it’s axiomatic that if we consume less, we conserve more). Then look to see how many little decisions you can make. Buying local, for example, may seem inconsequential at first but if you multiply the impact of the “buy local” mindset by 300 other million U.S. consumers, you can begin to appreciate how this small change can fundamentally benefit our little blue planet and our individual communities. Many people say local food tastes better or is nutritionally better for you. I think it’s kind of fun to scope out local resources. But here’s the biggest perk of buying local: it just makes you feel better.

By day, Larry Dutra is a purveyor of fine wine (read: big shot in the wine business — just kidding Larry!). When not sipping, he is indulging his passion for parenting (he and his wife of 27 years have two sons, aged 18 and 12). Larry also digs organic vegetable gardening, live music and physical activity in the great outdoors.

Want to buy local? Check out Local Harvest for a farmer’s market, family farms and other sources of local food near you.