I’m As Tall As I Want To Be
First published on February 1, 2012
A little wisdom entered my life a number of years ago, only it wasn’t so little, and it may have saved my self-esteem. I’ve never had much as it is— it wasn’t the leading indicator of your worth when I was a kid, education and manners were --but “out of the mouths of babes” came the genius for making me feel better about myself. When he was 6½ years old, my son Clay may just have imparted the most valuable proverb since Confucius.
One day, a boy in Clay’s first grade class asked him how old he was. It was their second day of school. Clay is nothing if not direct when he answers a question, so he said, “6½.”
“Wow, you’re little for 6½,” the boy answered, as if he had been asked for his opinion.
Clay bent to tie his shoe and said, “I’m as tall as I want to be.”
Wow. And I was supposed to teach him?
In just a few years Clay was in middle school. These are the years when the wrong brand of pants, the wrong book, the wrong hair, the wrong music-- the wrong anything --will result in a social stigmata so black, so deeply scarring, that its effects will continue to reverberate through high school and may remain a permanent and tender bruise on the psyche for the duration of a kid’s natural life.
I know. I suffered many emotional traumas in junior high school, and they have stuck with me all these years.
Case in point: I could never dance. Even in the fourth grade, when they used to mix the boys and girls together in the same gym class for that most humiliating and mysterious of all physical education exercises, square dancing, I could never get the hang of the simplest steps. The do-si-do was embarrassing and difficult enough (I could barely keep track of my assigned partner, let alone handle the constant arm-linking and partner-swapping), but inevitably at the end of every class session we formed and then ran the gauntlet known as the Virginia Reel. Like a pile-up on a foggy stretch of Interstate, I caused major collisions and back-ups every time we were forced to do that stupid, antiquated dance. That, coupled with the fact that no girl would take hold of my wet clammy hand unless Mrs. Chomski our gym teacher made her, made me feel about eighteen inches tall. It didn’t help that the one girl who would voluntarily take my hand, Glynda Snodgrass, was a head taller than I was and outweighed me by thirty pounds.
My feeling of self-worth on the dance floor never blossomed, and remains a tight cluster of decaying pedals to this day. Even now my inability to put one foot in front of the other in time with the music is embarrassing. How cool are you when even the Texas Two-Step confuses you? Never mind twerking or hip-hop or thrash-bang or gyro-twirling. I couldn’t dance when I was twelve, and I still can’t. This, to the detriment of my social calendar and the chagrin of every girlfriend I ever had and especially my now exTexas-born wife who who always griped that she couldn’t even take me to Billy Bob’s because I “couldn’t dance the Cotton-eyed Joe if I propped you up between two cowboys and shot live rounds at your feet.” I think that may be why she divorced me.
I’m a scratch over 5’8” on a good day. In the eighth grade this was not such a limiting feature since the tallest kid in our school topped out right at six-feet-one, and he was a klutz to boot. When he would brag about how tall he was, I would ask him how hard he had practiced to get that tall. “How hard did you study, Fender? Bet it cost your old man a fortune to buy you those extra four inches, huh?”
“Oh, yeah? I can whip your butt any day!”
“Is that so? Tell you what, Knuckles: as long as you have knees and nuts, it’s a fair fight.” Fun fact: don’t ever piss off the smaller guy. He’s got nothing to lose and he’s invariably faster, smarter, and more treacherous.
Ah, but when I hit high school half the girls were taller than I was, and I became incredibly self-conscious about my height— or lack thereof. After all, what popular girl wanted to walk hand-in-hand down the halls of her high school with a boy who only came up to her chin? Lucky for me, though, this turned out to be an unfounded fear on my part, since no girl would have anything to do with me anyway.
I admit I have secretly always worried about my boys, who are now 14 and 11, neither of them very tall for his age. I have worried that someday they too will have to look up into the nostrils of their square dancing partners, or catch a knee in the ear when they’re forced to play neighborhood basketball while they’re waiting for baseball season to arrive.
But as I think back to Clay’s response to the runny-nosed punk who said, “Wow, you’re little for 6½,” I take heart. Alexander the Great was little. Attila the Hun was little. Napoleon was little. Bruno Mars is tiny! Hell, Bruce Lee was only 5’8”. The point is, big guys don’t know what they’re buying into when they give smaller guys like us a hard time. Turns out, height is of no importance; wisdom and cunning are what matter.
Well . . . except maybe on the dance floor.
