In the hardware store, the
attendant ringing up my purchase asked how I was doing.
“Good.
How are you?”
He
replied that he, too, was good.
As
it’s summertime in this part of the world, the last few days had been sticky. I
expressed how wonderful it was to step out and experience such an invigorating
cool breeze.
Nodding
his head in agreement, he then looked at me again, cocking his head to the side
and said, “It’s funny. Those words together, ‘cool breeze’, just reminded me of
something I haven’t thought about in a while.”
Apparently,
when he was younger, he’d thought pretty highly of himself, and someone in his
neighborhood started calling him, “Cool Breeze.”
As
he passed over the credit card receipt for my signature, I replied, “That’s
hilarious. Because when I was in undergrad, I knew a person who also called me,
“Cool Breeze!”
We
laughed at this seemingly random, shared connection.
I faintly
remember the moment in undergrad when my friend christened me, “Cool Breeze.” We
were at rehearsals for a play, running lines.
During a break, almost as if trying it out, he said the words. It was so out of the blue; I remember choosing
to ignore it. Then he added, “From now
on, I’m going to start calling you, ‘Cool Breeze.’” I didn’t know what to do with it. With the
exception of a very short window of time in elementary school, all of my
nicknames were abbreviated versions of my first name. And even that one
elementary school exception had made sense given how it came about.
But
“Cool Breeze” seemed random.
“If
you start calling me that, I’m going to call you, ‘Grandmaster Funk!’” I
remember the look of surprise on his face. He wasn’t the only one; I hadn’t
really put a lot of thought into it, but since I said it, I was sticking with
it. And, true to my word, anytime he’d say, “Cool Breeze”, “Grandmaster Funk”
was never far from my lips.
Years
later, many years before the interaction at the hardware store, I had a
download of clarity that the nickname had actually been a bit of a praise. Perhaps
if I hadn’t initially filed it away as, “Random”, it would have occurred to me
earlier. I
guess I also could have just asked him why.
Anyway, how funny it is to run into someone else and discover this shared connection of a one-time nickname.