On Being Tall (2016)

 

Me (guess where) with my 8th grade basketball team

When we know a thing too well, when we are too familiar with a certain place or person or event, it becomes that much more difficult to describe.  Our mind creates such a realistic rendition of what we are trying to portray that when we retell it, we simply sketch an outline with charcoal and let assumption take care of the colors.  We forget what the listener or reader doesn’t know about that certain thing.  When the butterflies of love flap their freakish wings with the most gusto, write of hate.  When one is caught in the currents of people and cabs in busy city streets, write of the country.  Often, the most erudite of scholars make for the worst of teachers because they forget what it is like to not know.  On that note, I write this essay on being tall.  

You see, although I was well watered by the constant rains of Washington I was raised in, my vertical growth is less than impressive.  Perhaps the proportion of water to sun was out of balance, resulting in a stunting instead of spurting.  The neck muscles that hold up my head have conformed to my constant looking up at people, so now my head sits naturally at a slight upwards angle. I have never experienced growing pains, a kind of pain I feel must be akin to the satisfying pain one feels after a good morning workout.  I have long envied the grass for its impressive growth which is abated only by the cold, and then continues to grow until it is plucked out.  If only I were like the grass, I could move to a more tropical environment and gobble up those golden rays, converting them into upward growth.  Then when I reached my targeted height, I could establish a home in Iceland or Canada or Alaska, or become a nomad, always chasing the winter.  I assume it wouldn’t take more than a year to adapt to this new lifestyle of perpetual winter.  And it would be well worth the results.  However, I am not grass but a human and I am this size.  

But I stray.  I am writing on being tall.

Being tall is a valuable asset for sports.  Just as a bad ear is a handicap for the musician, or arthritis a lethal weapon for the surgeon, so is being short a disadvantage for a basketball player.  A tall man has one less stumbling block when it comes to sports, especially basketball.  A tall person playing basketball has to worry less about other people blocking his or her shots.  This allows them to maintain good form while being surrounded by enemy players.  Being tall also decreases the distance between the player and the basket, which provides an obvious advantage.

Few sports rely so heavily on one’s height as basketball.  Perhaps that is why I am so drawn to it.  You see, as far as I can tell, the one downside to being tall when playing basketball is that a person loses the ability, in part, to exceed expectations.  The audience grows accustomed to the big man scoring all the points and getting all the blocks.  It requires significant effort to match expectations, let alone surpass them.  What no one sees coming is the little dude maneuvering through the redwoods of players to score a layup, or toss the ball over the canopy from long range to drain a three-pointer.  And the worst player on the opposing team will almost always be chosen to guard the shortest player, giving that short player extra advantage if he plays his cards right.  Growing up I spent weeks, months, years, perfecting my skills so that by the time the other team realized their mistake and switched defenders, the damage had already been irreversible.  I couldn’t afford to not work hard.  You see, I have a certain condition.

I believe I was thirteen years old when I discovered this condition.  When I first received the news that I had constitutional growth delay, it sounded so long and fancy I was sure my life was drawing to a close.  To my elation, it was less terminal than it sounded.  It actually had no negative implications outside of making me short.  The doctor informed my mother and me that I was in the negative fifth percentile for height considering my age and gender.  I hadn’t even known that was possible, but he had the chart to prove it.  The curve ran below the line labeled “0.”  It was interesting being a size where you esteemed to reach 0.  

The doctor predicted that as I grew older, I would creep closer and closer to the average height and end somewhere between 5’7 and 5’8.  I am now twenty-two and 5’7.  The optimist inside of me clings to that extra inch, and will not give up hope for at least another three years.  But again, I stray.

Being tall opens up a level of dating options that those dwelling in lower altitudes don’t have access to.  Hugs become a completely new experience when one is tall.  Instead of her head resting on his shoulder during the embrace, it would only be inches away from his heart.  Every thud would confirm his love for her, which would in turn add to the reservoir of love she had for him.  I’m sure it has been proven that divorce rates decrease as the man’s height increases because of this very fact (citation needed).

I’ve asked numerous female friends whether or not they would or know any woman who would date a man shorter than them, and the answer is always a predictable no.  That doesn’t bother me all that much because I don’t think I could ever date someone taller than myself.  If I were to need assistance from my wife to grab a box from the top shelf, I would lose all dignity.         

It can seem unfair that we use so much judgment on things that we have no control over.  If I attest to not be interested in Samantha because her eyebrows are not shaped quite to my liking, there is a sense of shallowness to my disliking her.  But if I say the lack of chemistry stems from her being quick to anger, I am validated in my brushing her off.  It somehow seems less shallow than judging her because of her eyebrows.  In regards to this argument, we seem to assume that judging other on qualities that the person is increasingly less capable of choosing equates to a decrease in sophisticated and righteous judgment.  This seems fair enough.  But did Samantha choose her bad temper any more than her unappealing eyebrows?  Was there some moment in a pre-earth life where she begged the Creator to make sure her temper was trimmed to be exceptionally short?  Samantha doesn’t like getting angry, she is aware of her problems and tries to fix it, but when she plucks the hairs out they always seem to come back.  Her temper, I mean.

What I am sure of is that tall people did not choose to be tall any more than I chose to be short, and yet both are often judged as if those traits were somehow acquired through merit.

I like to imagine that our souls are thrust into bodies that contain random sets of weaknesses.  Maybe the body is equipped with a serious case of dyslexia.  Maybe it doesn’t have an arm.  Maybe it is a depressed body, releasing an unhealthy amount of chemicals that smother the naturally light hearted soul it encases.  Those deficiencies place certain strains on various parts of the soul.  Perhaps devolution of the body fosters evolution of the spirit.  I believe this could have been the case for me.

It was in the first grade that my eyes were first opened to the fact that I was short.  A few stereotypical bullies had spent the day addressing me as “shrimp.”  The only two things I knew about shrimp were that I greatly disliked the wretched slimy taste of them, and that they were small.  After school that day, I ran off the bus up to our two-bedroom rental home, used all my body weight plus the extra momentum from my backpack to swing the front door open, and ran to my mother.  I related what had happened through tears and hiccups.  I’m sure she had to suppress every motherly instinct to rush over and hug me and cry with me and tell me how tall I would probably be one day.  She knew of my naturally frail spirit, and understood that other methods were needed in order to help release the stronger, more confident man deep within that small body.

“Bryan, there are three things you can do. You can cry about it, get mad and fight back, or laugh about it and show them that it doesn’t bother you.”

I don’t remember my immediate reaction to her response, but I do know that I eventually tried the latter option.  It didn’t take long before the word “shrimp” became more of a term of endearment than anything else.  I grew to be content with, even proud of my height.  It pushed me when I might have otherwise remained content with mediocrity.

If I had been tall, there may have been a part of me that remained dormant to this day.  Five inches may have altered the definition of what it means to be me, and not just in terms of physique.  In this case, the cover somehow changed the writing inside.

Now I wonder why I received such a petty weakness as being short.

But I stray.  This essay is on being tall.