I’m short. More and more lately, I take umbrage at that fact.
In spite of the fact that I’m well past my fighting weight (don’t worry, the details will never appear in print) I am invisible to the vertically unchallenged. Apparently tall people’s eyes don’t register anyone below their armpit. My head has the bruises to prove it.
Many years ago a song told us, “Short people got no reason to live.” That was insult enough. But just to drive the point home, car engineers decided to put that lyric into action and promptly designed an airbag intended to decapitate any motorist not hitting the magic “average height” marker. Several years ago, I hit a patch of antifreeze on the highway coming around the bend from Gibsons. The car careened all over the road before coming to rest in the ditch on the opposite side of the road. My first thought on stopping was, “Oh no, I survived this far and if I don’t get out of here, the airbag will kill me.” In my haste to vacate the premises, I grabbed a blackberry bush – my only injury.
Another pain for my fellow petite persons is that very designation. Clothes shopping is an annoying enterprise. Everything labelled petite is designed for someone four inches taller. The only redemption comes when flood pants saturate the market, and lo and behold, they’re my prefect length for normal trousers. There’s nothing like the words “no hemming necessary” to make my heart beat faster.
But the biggest insult of all for people who fall short of the average height is the one-size-fits-all chair. You know the one – every public meeting place has them. I can testify it’s difficult to be taken seriously when one’s feet are dangling inches above the floor. You feel like the old Laugh-In character Edith Ann who used to pontificate about the world in an oversized chair. Of course, if you’re at a public meeting and finally do get an opportunity to speak, the microphone becomes a hazard. You can either attempt to pull it down to your height or stand on your tiptoes and shout into the darn thing. Dollars to doughnuts if you take the first option, the mike will either come crashing down on your fingers or make a gigantic squeal resulting in the audience literally wanting to cover their ears. Or if you’re just there as an observer for the local paper, you can count on dropping your writing pad off your sloping legs at least three times – short people’s exercise plan.
Never mind – there’s always a restaurant meal for solace after said meeting. But wait, they have the same chairs. Good thing napkin diving also qualifies as exercise; otherwise, who knows what my fighting weight would be. The long and the short of it is – I just want to be tall.
