My father never struck me as being particularly cool when I was a kid.

Oh, I thought pretty highly of him. I knew, for example, that he was the Strongest Man in the World – and I pitied the other kids who had to make do with punier, lesser dads. And my mother occasionally told me that he was the Handsomest Man in the World, which was something I didn’t have an opinion about, but accepted as fact. Truth is this: When I was young, it never occurred to me to dispute those assertions.

But cool? Fonzie was cool; he had the leather jacket and that hitting-the-jukebox magic. My dad was locked somewhere in a solidly temperate zone – warmish, perhaps, but certainly not cool.

Exhibit A: My parents’ music collection. It was small. And it contained the Barry Gibb-Barbra Streisand duet album.

The prosecution rests, your honor.

There were glimpses of something else going on, though. When I was in high school and bought “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” he and I spent a half-hour in the car as he remembered how the music sounded new in 1967. And both my parents told me their memories of seeing Kansas play at Peter Pan Park in Emporia, before Kansas became stars.

So I knew there’d been a time when my dad had rocked. That time, however, was long in the prehistoric – pre-me – past.

Something happened, though, as he approached 50, when my youngest sister was in college. He listened to one of her Radiohead albums. And he liked it.

“This is really good music,” he told me.

I smirked inwardly at the time. Yeah, I knew it was good. So why was he listening to it?

The re-rockification of my dad continues. A couple of months ago he borrowed a White Stripes album from me, then steadfastly refused to give it back – taunted me over the phone, in fact – until this last weekend.

“It awakens something, musically, in me that I haven’t felt in a long time,” he said.

And that’s when I figured out something: For years, decades in fact, my dad was too busy to be cool.

He’d had a record collection when he married my mom, but I came along and there were bills to be paid – so the records got sold. After that, he was too busy trying to feed all of us to care about the latest thing, the newest sound. Mostly, he just needed some sleep.

He doesn’t have to worry about those things so much anymore. My dad can finally relax and rock a little bit. There’s a new Jack White album coming out next month, with The Raconteurs, and I figure it’ll make an excellent Father’s Day gift.

We’ll have to have a talk, though, if he wants to go into the mosh pit.