I'm 5 feet, 2 inches and shrinking. Kim Townshend, my physical therapist, is even shorter. Only 5 feet, 1 1/4 inch, Kim can, nevertheless, supervise post-surgery hand exercises that would fell a giant.
I squished play-putty and pinched clothespins, curled weights and crunched sand. Squeezed sponge balls like a pitcher and played pickup pins like a kid. One session, Kim had me spider-walk my fingers forward and moonwalk them back. Sounds easy, but I bit my tongue trying. Kim's exercises were hard and I began to resent them, but she and I agreed on one point: Being short is a bummer.
I told Kim I couldn't find a short jean fit. "Try Kohl's," she said. "I wear their short petites and they're a perfect fit."
Come supper, Kim told me, she and husband, Wayne, do their own perfect fit. She points to what she wants on a top kitchen shelf and 6-foot-something Wayne fetches.
OK, so Kim's a bit bossy, but give her this: She can wait with grand patience behind others in a long line, seeing, she says, "only necks, shoulder blades and other boring body parts of those in front of me." Kim, the daughter of a doctor, probably sees a lot more, but didn't go there.
But when I went there, I mean to my last therapy session, I forgot to ask Kim if she had a childhood nickname. I was thinking along the lines of Pepin the Short. No, not that Pepin the Short, leader of the Franks and father of Charlemagne. I mean Charles Pepin, one of my students.
I don't know how he got that seat the first day, but very short Charles Pepin sat in the middle of my European history class. All eyes lay upon him because it was known I assigned seats by height.
To establish his right of residency, Charles Pepin began sharing his family tree, its roots reaching to the Middle Ages. Heretofore indifferent to medieval lineage, the class got their tickles up when Charles told them his ancestor, Pepin the Short, married Bertrada the Goosefoot, thought to be his second cousin and longtime mistress. Tickles turned to laughter when someone, I don't remember who, asked Charles if anyone in his family had a goosefoot. "Not to my knowledge," Charles honked.
Thus did Charles Pepin, so regal in his shortness and so silly in his funniness, remain in the middle of my history class and, while there, despite his nickname, grew to be a giant among his peers.
Besides genetics, environmental factors, I once read, like malnutrition and secondhand cigarette smoke, may also affect a person's height. So doesn't that leave us short people who might have been exposed to those factors even shorter? Indeed. But I think, like Avis, we try harder.
Take Sue Timmons, who, from years of accompanying lofty singers on stage, has learned to deal with her own 5 feet, 1/2 inch frame. "I don't wear patterns and I wear long, flowing lines. And," she said, her hazel eyes steely serious, "we short people shouldn't be cut up." I didn't know if she meant for stew or stir-fry, so I asked. "I mean," she said, "we shouldn't wear belts."
Learning from one in the public eye like pianist Sue Timmons, is one way to beat the "too-short" blues. That, or buy your clothes at Kohl's like Kim, my therapist, or like Charles Pepin, my student, just rise above the rest.
Here's some who did:
Beethoven - 5 feet, 3 inches
James Madison - 5 feet, 4 inches
Andrew Carnegie - 5 feet
Dolly Parton - 5 feet
Michele Bachmann - 5 feet, 2 inches
