Short Story
There’s an old English Folktale that I read as a child, told in a book by Paul Galdone. It’s called Teeny Tiny, about a very small woman, who lives down a teeny tiny lane in a teeny tiny house with a teeny tiny cat, and so on…. As I write this, I inhabit, for a few days, a very small cabin in the very small town of Dunsmuir, in Northern California. And I am short. The cabin’s owners take pride in the fact that it has maintained the essence with which it was built in the 1930s, probably then for a family of six. Today my dog and I get in each other’s way, and the refrigerator that’s been added since the cabin’s inception sits on its back porch. There’s an unfortunate lack of symmetry with the cabin’s back door, so that one must leave the small kitchen completely, go stand outside in the pouring rain (hallelujah—California’s water needs trump my convenience) and take out whatever small thing—a little milk, a little mustard--before reversing the process in order to return inside. Were I not also somewhat teeny tiny, this would be a bigger ordeal.
In the story, a teeny tiny woman, leaves her teeny tiny house with its teeny tiny furniture, walks down that teeny tiny path, and winds up—after pages and pages of teeny tinies—spoiler alert-- having a big voice in the end. At ever under five feet tall, and now, at near 65, shrinking to the point that I may never qualify again for the scarier rides at amusement parks (no loss there), I identify more than ever with that story’s heroine, though I wish my voice—at least in terms of influence, were bigger.
It’s not easy being a little old lady, emphasis on the little—though I don’t disagree with the adage that aging at any size is not an experience for the weak at heart. But as someone who, even in my 20s was routinely overlooked (literally) as tall, hurried, and besuited New Yorkers pushed their way over me into revolving doors, being 65 and short has become a grand slam ticket into obscurity. I can be –and often am—the most senior, most experienced, most articulate person in a professional meeting (so many of my peers are retired), and yet , no matter what hard-earned wisdom—and I am not long-winded—I have to share, I can see the glazed over look of my younger colleagues who, when they turn away from their smartphones at all, do not turn their eyes or ears in my direction. Worse still, if you will forgive my seemingly petty priorities, is my experience of ordering food at any sort of lunch or deli counter, especially true at taquerias, where I must tip-toe and often jump up and down (not in anger, but of necessity) just to be seen and heard, my orders almost always sacrificed somehow in the uncomfortable effort to negotiate the high counters. But like my teeny tiny predessesor, I won’t go quietly. My husband suggests I’ve waited all my life to be a feisty little old woman—I hate the word lady, which conjures for me the white gloves and veiled hats of my mother’s generation--and maybe he’s right. My mother was short-ish, my father too, and yet, my mother seemed ever annoyed with me as a teen that I did not grow tall and lean ( the latter harder to do when you’re short). Like many a Republican of today, she was no scientist.
Sure there are advantages to being old and small. Gallant young men now offer to carry my bags wherever I go, hoping to please, one recently admitted, the spirit of his mother, though to me, he seemed no younger than I am.. My dear friend Connie Cutter taught me long ago, (she’s a few steps ahead of me on this aging voyage ) that the acuity our eyesight dimisinshes in timely association with the appearance of wrinkles, so that what we see in the mirror is more youthful than is actually the case. That explains why the person I see each morning, while not a child or even young woman, couldn’t possibly be of similar age range to the mother of a near 50 year old client as the latter suggested recently. As a psychotherapist, I’m supposed to have been focusing on her needs of the moment, not calculating as I was—only for a few seconds, I swear, I’m good at math--,the earliest possible age her mother could have produced her to make the comparison fall even somewhat in my ballpark of comfort. I guess a question that might tie things back to height would be: Would I seem so old if not also small. It is not tall, elegant, older women, who are proverbially helped across the street.
I have to admit I enjoyed the attention last week, en route to a rally in Oakland –well, after some paradigm shift that reminded me I was no longer seen as young a student/hippie/radical type headed on Bart to another protest---when another passenger commented on my right to a double seat, given my age and the paraphernalia I was carrying, to attend to a demonstration concerning Mass Incarceration, Police Terror and the Criminalization of a generation. Once I got there, however, my shot stature prevented me from both seeing and hearing the words articulated by the speakers involved, though the screeches via megaphone came through loud enough to irritate well.
I know Randy Newman said it all in his song of 1977, called Short People, its most repeated line being: Short people got no reason to live. Nearly 40 years later, despite the gains made by other marginalized groups of people, we short folk have made little progress, well maybe Little People have, with their own TV shows and such, and clearly they have it harder in the main than the merely short. But, complainer of luxury problems that I am, I wonder how many little people get talked to like I often am with comments like “Oh, I forgot how short you are!” I mean, would you say to an African-American friend, I forgot how black you are?” or to a heavy friend “how fat you are?” Like people with what are called invisible disabilities, we short people may not have all the apparent inconveniences of those with more obvious limitations, but neither do we get any ADA benefits or slack when it comes to language or comedy. Short shrift, short end of the stick, short circuit, short changed and one that I heard for the first time recently—moral midget—all suggest a lesser than quality to those of us with limited stature, even though I maintain, we are, in the main, more fuel efficient, fit more compactly into challenging spaces (I rode to the Washington DC demos of the late 1960s in the backspace of my friend Alan’s VW bug) and according to my Googling, are less in danger of being hit by lightning. Compare that, though, to making less money per inch ($789 accroding to a study that controlled for gender, weight and age), it’s called the “height premium,” that we are seen as less authoritative (name a short President) , less intelligent, productive and and not surprisingly, after all that, we have less self-esteem. It’s probably harder too on short men than on short women, but little old men are not as much the butt of jokes or social scorn, perhaps because there are fewer of them. “Today, there remains one group that has made no progress in the face of rampant discrimination,” a spokesman for the the National Organization of Short Statured Adults.
Maybe you’re thinking that I should stop complaining about this in the face of real problems like the mass incarceration named above, Ebola, starvation, climate change, etc. People don’t get killed for being short. And that’s true enough. But without a reason to live, it’s hard to make good use of that fact..
There’s an old English Folktale that I read as a child, told in a book by Paul Galdone. It’s called Teeny Tiny, about a very small woman, who lives down a teeny tiny lane in a teeny tiny house with a teeny tiny cat, and so on…. As I write this, I inhabit, for a few days, a very small cabin in the very small town of Dunsmuir, in Northern California. And I am short. The cabin’s owners take pride in the fact that it has maintained the essence with which it was built in the 1930s, probably then for a family of six. Today my dog and I get in each other’s way, and the refrigerator that’s been added since the cabin’s inception sits on its back porch. There’s an unfortunate lack of symmetry with the cabin’s back door, so that one must leave the small kitchen completely, go stand outside in the pouring rain (hallelujah—California’s water needs trump my convenience) and take out whatever small thing—a little milk, a little mustard--before reversing the process in order to return inside. Were I not also somewhat teeny tiny, this would be a bigger ordeal.
In the story, a teeny tiny woman, leaves her teeny tiny house with its teeny tiny furniture, walks down that teeny tiny path, and winds up—after pages and pages of teeny tinies—spoiler alert-- having a big voice in the end. At ever under five feet tall, and now, at near 65, shrinking to the point that I may never qualify again for the scarier rides at amusement parks (no loss there), I identify more than ever with that story’s heroine, though I wish my voice—at least in terms of influence, were bigger.
It’s not easy being a little old lady, emphasis on the little—though I don’t disagree with the adage that aging at any size is not an experience for the weak at heart. But as someone who, even in my 20s was routinely overlooked (literally) as tall, hurried, and besuited New Yorkers pushed their way over me into revolving doors, being 65 and short has become a grand slam ticket into obscurity. I can be –and often am—the most senior, most experienced, most articulate person in a professional meeting (so many of my peers are retired), and yet , no matter what hard-earned wisdom—and I am not long-winded—I have to share, I can see the glazed over look of my younger colleagues who, when they turn away from their smartphones at all, do not turn their eyes or ears in my direction. Worse still, if you will forgive my seemingly petty priorities, is my experience of ordering food at any sort of lunch or deli counter, especially true at taquerias, where I must tip-toe and often jump up and down (not in anger, but of necessity) just to be seen and heard, my orders almost always sacrificed somehow in the uncomfortable effort to negotiate the high counters. But like my teeny tiny predessesor, I won’t go quietly. My husband suggests I’ve waited all my life to be a feisty little old woman—I hate the word lady, which conjures for me the white gloves and veiled hats of my mother’s generation--and maybe he’s right. My mother was short-ish, my father too, and yet, my mother seemed ever annoyed with me as a teen that I did not grow tall and lean ( the latter harder to do when you’re short). Like many a Republican of today, she was no scientist.
Sure there are advantages to being old and small. Gallant young men now offer to carry my bags wherever I go, hoping to please, one recently admitted, the spirit of his mother, though to me, he seemed no younger than I am.. My dear friend Connie Cutter taught me long ago, (she’s a few steps ahead of me on this aging voyage ) that the acuity our eyesight dimisinshes in timely association with the appearance of wrinkles, so that what we see in the mirror is more youthful than is actually the case. That explains why the person I see each morning, while not a child or even young woman, couldn’t possibly be of similar age range to the mother of a near 50 year old client as the latter suggested recently. As a psychotherapist, I’m supposed to have been focusing on her needs of the moment, not calculating as I was—only for a few seconds, I swear, I’m good at math--,the earliest possible age her mother could have produced her to make the comparison fall even somewhat in my ballpark of comfort. I guess a question that might tie things back to height would be: Would I seem so old if not also small. It is not tall, elegant, older women, who are proverbially helped across the street.
I have to admit I enjoyed the attention last week, en route to a rally in Oakland –well, after some paradigm shift that reminded me I was no longer seen as young a student/hippie/radical type headed on Bart to another protest---when another passenger commented on my right to a double seat, given my age and the paraphernalia I was carrying, to attend to a demonstration concerning Mass Incarceration, Police Terror and the Criminalization of a generation. Once I got there, however, my shot stature prevented me from both seeing and hearing the words articulated by the speakers involved, though the screeches via megaphone came through loud enough to irritate well.
I know Randy Newman said it all in his song of 1977, called Short People, its most repeated line being: Short people got no reason to live. Nearly 40 years later, despite the gains made by other marginalized groups of people, we short folk have made little progress, well maybe Little People have, with their own TV shows and such, and clearly they have it harder in the main than the merely short. But, complainer of luxury problems that I am, I wonder how many little people get talked to like I often am with comments like “Oh, I forgot how short you are!” I mean, would you say to an African-American friend, I forgot how black you are?” or to a heavy friend “how fat you are?” Like people with what are called invisible disabilities, we short people may not have all the apparent inconveniences of those with more obvious limitations, but neither do we get any ADA benefits or slack when it comes to language or comedy. Short shrift, short end of the stick, short circuit, short changed and one that I heard for the first time recently—moral midget—all suggest a lesser than quality to those of us with limited stature, even though I maintain, we are, in the main, more fuel efficient, fit more compactly into challenging spaces (I rode to the Washington DC demos of the late 1960s in the backspace of my friend Alan’s VW bug) and according to my Googling, are less in danger of being hit by lightning. Compare that, though, to making less money per inch ($789 accroding to a study that controlled for gender, weight and age), it’s called the “height premium,” that we are seen as less authoritative (name a short President) , less intelligent, productive and and not surprisingly, after all that, we have less self-esteem. It’s probably harder too on short men than on short women, but little old men are not as much the butt of jokes or social scorn, perhaps because there are fewer of them. “Today, there remains one group that has made no progress in the face of rampant discrimination,” a spokesman for the the National Organization of Short Statured Adults.
Maybe you’re thinking that I should stop complaining about this in the face of real problems like the mass incarceration named above, Ebola, starvation, climate change, etc. People don’t get killed for being short. And that’s true enough. But without a reason to live, it’s hard to make good use of that fact..
