Circus Cool

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Circus Cool

My husband and I live squarely in the world of blended families. He had four sons when we married, and we have a daughter. Add in eleven grandkids and when our gang gets together we have twenty-one unique personalities in the same house. And we’re an animal-loving group, so we also have the nine dogs, a couple of cats and one rabbit, each with their own sweet little ADD and OCD personalities. Oh, yeah, that’s fun!

But we have a lot of “cool” in our family. Each family member has some level of cool, something exceptional and unique, something beyond their DNA that makes him or her spectacular.

But most people would say the highest-ranking cool member in our gang of twenty-one is our Brooklyn son. I mean just living in Brooklyn is cool, right? And Brooklyn has the whole Johnny-Depp-bad-boy-vibe-thing going on.

He works hard to give the impression he’s oblivious to the level of cool that swirls around him like Zorro’s cape. But I’m not buying it.

Once, he and I were standing in line at an airport Starbucks behind an attractive middle-aged woman. She casually turned, took one look at Brooklyn with his shoulder-length black hair, riveting dark eyes, and reared back. The blood drained from the poor woman’s face, and a second later her eyes morphed into hungry-predator. She licked her lips and whispered, “Oh, my God.” Yeah, that happened.

Even though Brooklyn is six-foot-two, lean and muscular, I wanted to throw my one-hundred-thirty-pound flabby self in front of him and use my body as a human shield against the hussy-cougar. But instead, Brooklyn flashed his box-office Oscar-worthy smile, and the pouncing cougar turned tomato red and went mute. I took pity on her, laughed, and said, “He is pretty, isn’t he.”

I used to refer to Brooklyn as my little vagabond because he loved to ramble. And just so you know, you’re not a true vagabond if you stoop so low as to make a hotel reservation, use a map, or heck, even have a rough idea of where you’ll be three days from now.
Brooklyn is one of those guys who’ll decide to go clubbing at midnight and end up dancing the night away with Gwen Stefani. Yes, that also happened. He’s just that cool.

Our therapist daughter and Brooklyn not only love each other, they like each other, and they often go out when she visits him in NYC.

She complains that clubbing with her brother Brooklyn is exhausting. Evidently, all the single females in the club experience the pouncing-Tigger-syndrome and vie to become her bestie. But The Therapist isn’t fooled.

What these women really want is to make eye contact with Brooklyn. They want an introduction, they want a phone number, they want to fall in love and have his baby. The Therapist says it’s worse if the club has a decent band because Brooklyn-boy can dance.

Next on the list of the coolest family members is our granddaughter, Dancing-Beauty, who dreams of flying in the circus. In my opinion, circus cool ranks at the very top of the family cool meter. I mean really who doesn’t love the idea of walking a tightrope, or swinging on one of those trapeze bars in those cute little outfits?

Our little Dancing-Beauty is content to navigate the lanes of life on her own, and frankly, you’re not invited on her trip. After all, she knows where she’s headed and if you don’t see it, well, that’s your short-sightedness. As a three-year-old, she walked into my kitchen after sleeping until eleven o’clock one morning announcing she was aware the early bird captured the worm, but, she asked, who likes worms anyway? Yep, she views our universe with a different set of rose-colored glasses. Her lens is more of a kaleidoscope.

And our Dancing-Beauty not only dreams of being in the circus, she works her butt off training. She’s in her last year of college, and I have no doubt next year I’ll be in Vegas, popping Xanax, watching her fly, swing, and balance on razor-thin bars thousands of feet in the air.

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