The Tall and Short of It

I don’t pay much attention to height. I divide humanity into three general categories: shorter than me, my height, and taller than me. I’m 6’2”, so most people are shorter. I’m not sure if my inattention to that particular physical attribute is because I don’t care about height or because I don’t care about people. I also never notice eye color, hair color, or what someone is wearing. If a police sketch artist asked me to describe a perpetrator, they’d end up with a stick figure with a smiley face. I assume criminals only commit crimes because they’re fun. My wife Lola sees the world differently. She’s more detail-oriented, especially when it comes to other human beings. She’ll frequently try to tell me about someone we’ve been going to church with for years who she saw at a random store, adding more and more descriptors as I continue to tell her I don’t know who she’s talking about. Then again, it’s possible these aren’t real people and she’s trolling me. The eye patch and peg leg should have been dead giveaways. The one feature she notices above all others is height. That’s life for a short girl.

The weird part is she’s not actually that short. She’s 5’2”, although I say she’s 5’1 and ¾” when I make fun of her, which is always. She knows every celebrity who’s her height or shorter, which is a surprising amount of them. The key to succeeding in Hollywood is never eating your vegetables. The average height for women in the US is 5’4”. To Lola, those ladies are towering Amazons. She wishes she was taller, but it’s unclear what she would do with those extra two inches. Get your mind out of the gutter, please. Anything out of reach for someone who is 5’2” is out of reach for someone who is 5’4”. That’s step stool territory for both groups. Upper cabinets weren’t built for people of that stature, which belies the idea that girls belong in the kitchen. If women were meant to do the cooking, they could reach the mandolin slicer on the top shelf.

There are more advantages to being short than to being tall.