Years ago when I was but a wee lad growing up in the upper midwest, Mom and Dad would load my…read moresister and me into our hulking Ford Galaxy to make our weekly trip to visit Gramma Dora who lived in a massive old farmhouse about an hour away. I always looked forward to these trips because Gramma had a huge upstairs with rooms filled with bright and shiny treasures, at least in the eyes of this innocent youngster. To others, this was a house filled with junk (in fact, one room was known as The Junk Room), sometimes requiring a shuffling of feet to make it from one end of the room to the other. Along the way, I found old magazines, metal toys, discarded cigar boxes, and glass figurines, each with its own history, its own story. I would spend hours playing with these treasures, vicariously living the existence of each through the mind of a 7 year old. My sister was a constant companion on these journeys, we would compare stories and invent new and up to date versions of what each discovery had endured. Sometimes these items were props in our new imaginary adventures.
Our reverie was put aside only to go back downstairs to watch The Wonderful World of Disney, after which we piled back into the Ford and made the trek back home, but not before Gramma Dora would inquire what we had found and gave us her account of how each thing came to rest in the massive farmhouse. As I got older, Gramma Dora would spend hours telling me about when she was a kid, what she did for fun, what her life was like, and how her life changed as she got older. Gramma Dora was a cool old gal, on long car trips across the country, she was my backseat companion, sometimes even taking the oversized Soundesign headphones from my head to listen to the Elton John Goodbye Yellow Brick Road Double album that I had recorded onto cassette. She would show me pictures of infant me sitting on Grampa August's lap. He passed before I was able to really know him, but Gramma Dora assured me that I was just like him. Gramma passed from this life when I was in High School, but to this day, when confronted with a fork in the road, I think of what advice she would give, which direction was the way to the unfound cool and exciting.
Cool and Eclectic is my connection back to those days. It is filled top to bottom with treasures and memories from years gone past, with treasures that have history and stories of their own. When I see an old pinball machine, I'm taken back to my misspent youth where my pinball partner and I would rule the King Tut table at our local restaurant. The bins filled with vinyl records are a link back to that time, to what I was doing, to what I was feeling, to what I was dreaming. My visits to Cool and Eclectic are not shopping trips, but rather side trips down the too long ignored rabbit trails of yesteryear. You don't shop here, you linger here. You contemplate here. At best, you recharge, you reconnect with those hopes and dreams of youth and find a way to find that path again as an adult.
To compile a list of what is here is fruitless and not the best use of time. Instead, you visit, you bask, you remember. You allow yourself to dream.
As a teenager standing at Gramma Dora's fresh gravesite, a fellow mourner came up behind me, but his arm around my shoulder, and said,'You had a real nice Gramma.' At that moment, I shed tears of sorrow at my loss, and tears of joy of what I had the chance to experience. Although my visits to Cool and Eclectic don't elicit the same visible response, somewhere deep inside this grown adult, I find that moment again. And it makes me happy. It makes me feel connected.
Thank-you, Cool and Eclectic for being who you are, for being more than big box retail, for giving me the chance to pause and reflect on where I have been and where I am going.
