Month: October 2016

SaturdayScribbles

Fact: I was born tall.

Twenty-four inches of tallness. I should have stayed in the womb where it was warm and fertile. Had I been able to linger there, I might have had the boost I needed to become a basketball player. But birth stunted my growth, dramatically, limiting me to five feet, one and a half inches, almost.

Fact: My life has been about figuring out how to compensate, living in the world of talls.

Growing up short—an oxymoron? —has had a few—two I can think of, compensatory advantages, such as, I can’t see what’s going on with all the talls blocking my view, but, I can wend my way (sneak) through the crowd and squirm to the front without anyone noticing or caring. And when playing hide-go-seek, I’m able to squeeze into places where no one ever suspects a person could fit. Okay, that’s all the advantages I can think of…

But, I figure, isn’t that what we all have to do? Find out how to deal with our shortcomings—so to speak. That’s why I have a stepstool where cabinets and shelves exist; that’s why I make friends of tall people in the aisles of stores; and that’s why I use booster pillows.

Fact: It’s assumed I can’t do something that’s physically challenging.

As a kid, I was given what I used to refer to as–and not in a good way–“Joey Jobs.” (I was called Joey, then.) I felt my jobs lacked importance and significance. These tasks were the ones that were in low places and took little skill, like after grocery shopping, I got to put away the hand soap and toilet paper under the bathroom sink.

Fact: I was stereotyped.

When I first set foot on the softball field, guess what position I was steered to? Yup, catcher. My coach said that it wouldn’t take much bend in my knees to keep my head below the swing of the bat. And I should be able to get on base by just standing there, never having to take the bat off my shoulder, since a pitcher would have to have an incredibly good aim to get a ball through my strike zone. I would be walked, a lot. That was his batting strategy for me.

Fact: I can hit a ball hard enough to get into the outfield.

Luckily, I was born a natural athlete and I could do well, so my size was often, “overlooked”—it’s hard to find words that don’t refer to something undersized. Sometimes it wasn’t that my stature was unnoticed, but viewed as, “look what she just did and she’s so tiny, like when I hit a homerun, stole second base, or carried the equipment bag over my shoulder. That remark always started a fire in the pit of my stomach and smoke would billow out of the top of my head. 

Fact: I like shorter people, a lot.

Standing next to a shorter person, makes me feel good. In school, I was next to the shortest kid in my class. After all these years, I still remember the name of the shortest person, that’s how significant it felt to me to not to be the smallest. To this day, when I see a short person who, from a distance, is probably shorter than I am, I make my way over and find a reason to stand close, so I can feel, well, taller. (I know—I’ve been told—that’s sick.)

Fact: The shortest person in my class was Linda Sheppard. (If you are out there, Linda, I’m sorry for calling you out, like that.)

Another fact: I don’t think “short.”

I walk around not thinking I’m less than average in height. Maybe it’s because I’ve learned to move really fast. My legs, most likely, appear a blur as I hustle along side someone with long legs. I will not ask them to slow down. I will not complain about my soaring heart rate; I will not sweat or at least I won’t let them see me become moisten—that’s why I carry tissues in my pocket.

Fact: It’s assumed that I’m not big enough to have a substantial thought.

I found, early on, that I had to come up with strategies to be seen and heard. That meant, as a short person, I had to search and develop my strengths; such as, my capability to learn big words to put with my burgeoning philosophical thoughts, political leaning, and other ideas of a curious and unfiltered mind. However, my mother mostly viewed my ranting as insolence when I questioned adults or authority. But I got attention.

Fact: Because I’m short, it’s further assumed I will always settle for the smallest piece of cake.

Why would anyone assume that? Geez!

Fact: Being taller than my granddaughter will last just so long.

Several years ago when my five-year-old granddaughter, Eowyn, wanted to bypass the vegetables and proceed directly to the chocolate ice cream dessert. Her father told her that if she didn’t start gobbling down her veggies, she’d end up being short like her Grammie Joey—as my granddaughter calls me—who didn’t eat her vegetables before dessert.

For Eowyn, I’ve been set up as the poster person for what happens to kids who eat sweets and won’t consume their greens. See my dilemma! If I claim I ate them, she has no incentive to eat her veggies…I’ve been held up to her as being a good example of a bad role model for growth.

She’s seven now and when I picked her up from school the other day, she introduced me to her friend. And for no apparent reason, she went on to explain that I was short because of my lack of vegetable intake. The kid to whom she was explaining my condition shook her head, her  eyes bugged out in disbelief and horror. Frankly, I wanted to run and hide. It’s one thing that I take-one-for-the-team in my own family; it’s quite another that this rumor is likely to spread around the school grounds, and who knows where it might migrate from there. But, I quickly defended myself to this wide-eyed kid-friend of Eowyn’s by explaining, “But I eat them now.”

“Oh Grammie,” my granddaughter said, “ you had to eat them when you were a kid. It’s too late for you now.”

After dropping her off at her house, I went home and comforted myself with a serving of chocolate cake, a big effing piece.

(For more SaturdayScribbles, scroll down to “What’s Not To Love.”)

 

 

What’s Not To Love?

A blindfold would help me out, a lot, driving down the highway trying to get to our destination. The eye cover is not intended for me, being the driver, but for Elaine, my wife, who is ever alert and curious. She’s the trip planner and has a habit of stealthy factoring in the inevitable possibility of a multitude of spontaneous side trips, otherwise known to me as: butterfly stops—think of an orange and black winged Monarch flitting in a sunny field of blooming flowers, alighting on petals, sipping, and then flying to the next, each one holding the possibility of being tastier than the last.

Like the butterfly, it’s often a wildflower along side the road that Elaine wishes to visit–with flower book in hand, but it’s not just flowers that require the screech of brakes from our truck camper—along with horn blowing and hurled curses from the tailgater. It might be a billboard promising a never-before-seen-the-likes-of Yooper tourist trap or a what-looks-like to her a quaint establishment that must be perused. In other words—she often points out, in what sounds to me to be a superior tone—it’s the path not the destination…Yada-yada-yada.

Then there are the dirt roads leading back into the woods that catch her longing to explore: Elaine imagines a forest Shangri-La; l envision banjos, Bubba and his meth-toothed friends, which encourages me to paddle the truck camper past, as fast as I can and mutter, “Sorry honey, I didn’t see it in time…no place to turn around.” My head bobbles side to side to demonstrate my earnestness.

Her eyes roll.

To counter twenty-seven years of butterfly travel, I finally come up with a plan—obviously, I’m not the fast study my mother claimed I was. I propose to Elaine in a manner promising novelty and excitement, “lets have a travel theme for our trip, this time.” The underlying message that I hope she isn’t picking-up: if it doesn’t fit the theme, we don’t stop.

To my surprise and delight, Elaine likes the idea, but since I came up with the plan of targeted travel, she insists on choosing the theme. Fair enough. I figure, as long as it isn’t: planet Earth, I’ll be good with it. Being the fair-minded woman she is, she throws me a bone by suggesting I pick the back-up choice, a theme B, as it were—which, she warns, will only go into effect in the case of a catastrophe, such as a nuclear blast. I suck on that thought while she ponders what her focus will be, then she lights up and announces: Waterfalls.

I like it.

In fact, I love waterfalls with their peaceful, relaxing sounds, remote and beautiful locations…

What’s not to love?

How about way too easily accessed waterfalls, (Who thought it a good idea to build roads to these places?) with t-shirt shops and junk food?) where crowds of noisy on-lookers  block my view and don’t move on in a timely fashion, taking countless selfies of every imaginable combination of backgrounds and persons in their group.

Then there are the cotton candy fingers of little kids that find their way to my outfit de jour—for the record, I need no help grubbing up my my clothes. Then, my worst fear happens—at the third waterfalls. I fall victim to a lethal stabbing from a triple-decker death-by-chocolate ice cream cone straight to the back of my pants.

That’s what’s not to love…and that’s my nuclear blast.

As Elaine tends to me—in public—sopping up the brown creamy mess from my pants, I’m grumbling and becoming agitated. Being an ex-social worker, she recognizes when a melt down is imminent. She says, in an attempt to keep an obscenity-ridden (but totally justified) outburst at bay, “how about we just go to Tahquamenon Falls, we’ll  skip the next nine smaller ones.”

I perk up from being  a petulant child–her description, not mine. Whatever! But, I do, almost, forget about my wet stained pants. Besides, I’m remembering that there’s a brewery at Tahquamenon, flipping my mood 180 degrees, and I know that Elaine likes that place and will enjoy a craft beer there: I’m back to: What’s not to love? Especially since my theme B was: Bars of the U.P. (Pic: Elaine enjoying a glass of beer at the Tahquamenon Falls brewery’s deck.)

I love bars, not the popular ones, and not for the booze—though, I confess, I do imbibe while I’m there, in order to fit in, of course. But it’s the old ones that I love, the ones with personality and history, the older the better. I study them. So much life has happened in these places.

It’s archeological. It’s science.

Not that the Tahquamenon brewery is old, but it will be one day and I won’t be around to study it, so I got to take what I can get, now. Maybe I can add a few nicks, table carvings, and spills for future archeologists. We still have a lot of miles between us and Tahquamenon—the grandmother of Michigan falls, so I pull out my guide to Yooper Bars and announce we’ll be heading for the Up Chuck bar and grill; the next day, the Pine Stump Cook shack and Drinkery; from there, on to the Red Flannel bar; and then,  Tahquamenon Falls and brewery; and we’ll be finishing it all off with a grand finale: a tour of the Barmuda Triangle in the early settled city of Sault St. Marie (13 bars in three blocks)— advertised as: You won’t disappear but your troubles will…

What’s not to love?

(To hear more about our travels, scroll down to: “A Stopover in Hell.”)