Growing up short — to borrow Bette Davis’s line about growing old — isn’t for sissies. But it’s especially rough when you’re a guy. The ache of watching everybody else in gym class predictably being chosen before you. The dread of approaching the height-requirement bar at amusement parks. The sting of watching your friends joyously riding roller coasters as you force a pained smile across your reddened face. Perhaps worst of all, the humiliation at your first school dances, slow dancing with a girl who’d tower over you like a Women’s NBA All Star awkwardly embracing a nervous jockey.
Genetics being what they are, countless generations before me were also vertically challenged. My dad was, of course, no exception. In my early twenties, still plagued by this struggle, I asked him for some words of wisdom. He confessed that it used to bother him so much that, one day when he was around my age and courting my mother-to-be, he slipped into a store specializing in “Elevator Shoes for Men.” My eyes widened in amazement. Maybe there was some hope for me! I implored him to tell me every detail.
He recounted that as he sat down to get fitted, he noticed an older gentleman — sporting a stylish suit and tie — in the chair next to his. Even though they were both seated, the guy still looked a foot taller than my dad. He was, in fact, so tall that my poor dad had to crane his neck up just to make eye contact. The man’s height was everything my dad desperately wanted to have. “Excuse me sir, how tall are you?” my dad inquired. The man smiled and replied, “I’m six-two.” My dad was baffled: “Then why are you getting these elevator shoes?” The man responded with a shrug, “I want to be six-four.”
I had asked my dad for some words of wisdom. And he provided them to me. But not about being short. Instead, they were about the insatiable itch of envy…which can only be truly scratched by painstaking acceptance. Acceptance of oneself and even one’s struggles. I got it. When it is “never enough,” it’s never going to be enough. (But I’d still like to be six foot two — hell, even five foot ten — for just a day…)