Archives for February 2014

For as long as I can remember, people have gotten my age all wrong. When I was around 5 or 6 or 10 (those ages are all clumping together at this point) people used to think my brother and I were twins. Bear in mind, now, my brother is 3.5 years younger than me, although he will deny this if you ask him. That is all odd enough. But what makes people particularly odd and unique as creatures is that I am often asked questions pertaining to my age, as if people think I’m one of Ashton Kutcherr’s tricks, here to punk them (channeling my best digital Joe Pesci there).

I am proud to say that I actually had an encounter with a celebrity (of sorts) in this particular regard. Back when I was in college, James Carville came to speak at my campus. I was excited to see the excitable Cajun I had been watching on TV. I have absolutely no recollection of what he said during his presentation although I am sure it was very intelligent and well-said. After the talk, we all got up to introduce ourselves. I waited patiently in line, excited to shake Mr. Carville’s hand. Hey, I’ve been a political junkie for a long time. That’s what happens when Abraham Lincoln is one of your great heroes. Anyway, as I finally approached Mr. Carville, ready to look up at his weird face in admiration and star-struckedness, he asked, “Are you sure you’re old enough to be here?”

I can honestly say I have absolutely no memory of how I responded, if I responded at all. I’m sure I could have retorted with an immensely insightful comeback that would have inspired Mr. Carville to hire me onto his staff or some such, but apparently that was not the outcome.

To be fair, Mr. Carville is not the only person to question my age-appropriateness. He’s merely the most famous to do so. So far. The shining moment of my high school career (and there are many contenders) occurred one sunny day as I was walking down the sidewalk, ready to walk across the street to put in some slave labor I meant to help out at my family’s business. As I was walking I started hearing this, “Hey…hey!” Now, I don’t know about you but often times when I hear someone saying hey, or when I see someone waving, they are in fact attempting to communicate with another person, so I always strive to play it cool. Also, if you are in fact hearing voices you want to lay low a little anyway. In this particular case, the source of the sound became clear as I passed one of the school busses that was lined up, ready to take my little minion peers home. It was a bus driver beckoning to me. I saw many minion faces pressed against the glass of the windows as he asked, “What grade are you in? What grade are you in?”

Have you ever had a moment where you feel like a spotlight has begun to shine on you just as you begin to pick your nose?

Not that anyone picks their noses. But you get my point.

Given all of these experiences, you can’t blame me for having one time approached one of those “guess your age” fortune tellers at a festival. My dad and I thought the prize money would be a gimme. Every other person on the planet misjudged my age. Now I could FINALLY make some money out of that fact. I was about 12 at the time and I believe the person guessed spot on (they had some margin for error of course). “You carry yourself with too much maturity,” they said, seeing my frustration.

There’s a moral in there somewhere.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdlasica/5817022049/ via Creative Commons

When I was in high school, the cards of popularity were pretty well stacked against me. I looked “different,” first of all, which in the world of adolescents is pretty much a curse. Insofar as sports went, to say that I was not talented would be a horrible understatement. The fact is that my only athletic talent was catching spherical objects with my face, regardless of the size of said spherical object. I would get pain in my ribs after running for about 2 minutes. However, there was one thing I did in high school that I unquestionably dominated, and that was domestic extemporaneous speaking on the speech & debate team. Don’t get me wrong – this was no ticket to the popular crowd. However, every Saturday for months at a time, I was the person to beat. I brought home a trophy almost every weekend. I felt respected, in my element.

Then, my team and I went out to dinner before a big tournament.

Imagine going out with a group of people whom you like but whom you also are sort of competitive with at the same time. And then imagine having someone pull your pants down in front of all of those people.

Don’t worry. That didn’t *exactly* happen. However, something that felt similar did happen. As a hostess came over to seat us, she asked one of the coaches if we’d be needing a kids menu. The question, of course, was in reference to me. Suffice to say, I cried, the hostess cried, the waitress cried…I think even the manager burst into tears at one point. It was awful.

Of course, this was not the first nor the last time I would be offered a kids menu or other related material in completely awkward situations. I was eating lunch with my mom at a mall restaurant one day and the waitress asked if we’d be needing a sippy cup. Bear in mind, now, that I was in high school at the time. Did the waitress see a lot of 12-year-old kids that needed sippy cups? Did she experience a lot of young looking people who had extreme eye-hand coordination problems? I’ll never know. However, I did say yes to the sippy cup. That’s how I roll. I didn’t get it.

Perhaps the most puzzling instance in which I was identified as a child was when I went out to a business lunch. I was dressed rather formally  – I think even in pinstripes, and the hostess asked if we’d be needing a kid’s menu. I have often wondered what kind of kids she saw. I mean, this was a Bob Evans, so I wouldn’t think parents would go to the trouble of dressing their kids to the nines in order to eat sausage gravy and biscuits. But apparently children came in their in business suits often enough that the question was warranted. Go figure.

These scenarios used to bother me a lot (see high school experience). Nowadays, if someone offers me a kids menu, crayons, or a booster chair (that really happened) I tend to say, “Yeah!” This infuriates my brother when it happens in his company. He feels I am helping the hostess or waitress demean me. I figure that if they want to give me a dollar hot dog I’ll take it, and I have always loved coloring.

I suppose if I were a truly enlightened person I would take the host or hostess aside and say, “Hey there. I know this is hard to understand, but even though I am small to your eyes, I am actually a big girl. All the way grown up. Sometimes people come in different shapes and sizes, and as you’re in the service business you should strive to be more sensitive.” I may get to that point one of these days. For now, I’ll enjoy my sippy cups.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sliceofchic/4876620694/ via Creative Commons

It seems to me that humans spend most of their time trying to differentiate themselves from other humans. By dress, by ways of talking, by mannerisms, humans strive to make themselves memorable in some way. And yet, if you have a bad date or encounter a person who creeps you out, you will describe them as, “Uh, kind of different…” It will be understood that “different” is not good. It is not a bragging point for that poor nameless soul.

I am not sure but I would wager that all of us have a moment when we realize we are different from other people or that other people are different from us. Great men like Martin Luther King, Jr., and William Faulkner have talked about this moment when you notice with a start that we are not all the same. For King, this moment came when he suddenly was not allowed to play at a white friend’s house anymore. And Faulkner, betwixt moments of inebriation, wrote about how slave children and the master’s children suddenly realized they couldn’t play with each other anymore. That recognition of difference pops up at the most inconvenient times.

You might well wonder how I could fail to notice that I was “different” compared to other kids, but the fact is that this point eluded me for about the first four years of my life. I suppose I reckoned that I was a kid and kids were meant to be small. The ads for Flinstones Vitamins, which I hated, promised that if I ate one vitamin a day I would grow up to be able to reach the door knob, and I had perfect faith that this was so. If other people were bigger than me it was because they were older. My vitamins and I would catch up. In the meantime I was differentiating myself as a young tot by announcing that Amadeus was my favorite movie and that anything bad I did was actually the responsibility of Margie Stoopee. That was different enough.

My moment of “I’m different” finally came upon me as I was walking in a single file line in Kindergarden. There was a long line of windows that we had to walk by I think on the way to the gym. I was wearing a big fluffy purple 1980s winter coat and felt a little bit like I was a marshmallow. Suddenly, I looked to the right and I noticed, without warning, that everyone else had their heads at pretty much the same level, but my head was much lower. There was a dip where I stood and it followed me wherever I went. What was that all about?

Nobody said anything. There was neither a cue for Twilight Zone music nor a chorus of angels praising my awareness. But from that moment on, I was aware, keenly, that I was different somehow. I asked my parents not to show me pictures from school concerts because there was a dip where I was standing. I hated having my picture taken with friends because I was always standing in a dip. In college I event went so far as to make my friends sit down if we were taking our picture together (believe it or not some of them even squatted or sat on their knees to accommodate me. How cool and different is that?).

The thing about being “different” is that in the end you have three choices, usually. You can make peace with whatever makes you different, you can try to change what makes you feel different, or you can turn a blind eye.  For me, changing what makes me different is not really an option, primarily because I’m not a great athlete and thus I feel stilts would be a bad idea. But I do have the option of making peace with the dip where I stand. It’s always going to be there. And I can try to change what other people say and think about the fact that there is a dip where I stand.

We are all “different” in some way. Even if you don’t feel all that different now, at some point you are sure to be thrust into a situation where you feel like you’re standing in a dip. Knowing humanity, someone may even be there to point it out to you. At that point, you can try to fight it, you can try to make peace with it, or you can try to change how people feel about it.

Which path is yours?

When I was in high school, especially during my senior year, my parents were quite intent on me getting a job. They claimed it was because they wanted me to contribute to my pending *massive* tuition bill. In retrospect I am fairly certain they were looking for ways to get me out of the house. An over-achieving pubescent female facing a major life-change is no treat. You’ll say anything to get away from these strange creatures so closely resembling your dear loved baby.

Whatever their reasoning, I took the suggestion of my parents and applied for a job at a craft store. I had always been interested in crafts. In fact, anything befitting any 87-year-old woman I had felt keenly was also befitting me. I was called grandma more than once during this stage of my life, although I never did get one of those plastic bonnets. I figured that getting a job at a craft store would be the perfect way for me to proceed in spending every penny that I earned. It was job security. That store would always have at least one customer, and I knew it. Amazingly, and for the one of the only times in my life, I was hired after my first interview.

Working at a craft store is an interesting experience. One expects everyone to be sweet and charming because after all, only sweet and charming people do crafty things. My experience was a little astray from my expectations. One time when I was cashing out a customer, a seemingly sweet older lady, I found many “notions” (those being needles, pins, and the like for you craft-jargon impaired) rolled up in some fabric she had purchased. Surely she had simply neglected to unroll her fabric at the counter, I told myself. Only I had been warned that this was the most common way people shoplifted merchandise. I also learned that craft store aisles apparently have signs, invisible to me, that say, “Please fart here.” I would be walking around “putting things away” (code for shopping) and would walk through the most impossible clouds of methane you could possible imagine. Sometimes the guilty party would be nearby and I would swear they would grin as they watched me, subtly, out of the corner of their eye, walk through their vomitous wreckage. Sometimes no one was around. That was almost more disturbing. A fart with staying power is something to lament in this world.

The most educational part of this job for me was discovering, first-hand, that people do not become more mature or more sensitive as they age. I had perhaps naively assumed that this was a natural progression. Of course you get picked on in high school, I reckoned, but once you get out of those hellish halls, you will be around adults, and adults are more aware of their impact on others. You see, as fate would have it, I am 4’5 instead of 5’4 or 6’4. I got picked on rather mercilessly at school. I started my job at the craft store ready to be exposed to the world of grown-ups, where I would be accepted simply for who I was, green apron and all.

The thing about humanity is that when there is a lesson to learn you don’t just learn it once and move on. The universe has a way of hammering these lessons into your head. My years at the craft store exposed me to some fantastic ways in which people can be educational.

I learned, for example, that people do not really understand anatomy. A lady asked me one day to help her find a particular kind of fake flower. Finding anything in the floral section was enough to give me the trembles. All of that smelly eucalyptus and tangly ivy. Nightmarish. But ultimately I found what she was looking for, high up on the top of the shelf, of course. I pointed, using my finger. The nice one. Instead of saying “thanks” the woman inexplicably said, “Wow, that’s so high. I bet you can’t even see that high.” Forgetting for a moment that I clearly could see that high as I had just pointed to something up there, let’s take this moment to note that no matter how short you are, your neck still enables you to tilt your head back so you can look up. Granted, there are some people of any height who may be encumbered in this regard, but it is not in fact size-related.

I learned that some people require something familiar in order to understand the strange. I was helping a customer once and out of the blue they blurted out, “You remind me of my aunt. She was also little.” <Pregnant pause as I certainly had no idea what to say. Does one thank a person for this information?> “She was a real spitfire.” Was this granting me permission to respond in a repulsive and unladylike way? I had no idea.

I learned that people don’t really understand relative size differences or references.  I was checking out a customer’s items close to closing time one night when suddenly she said, “You are so tiny. You must keep your shoes in an index card box.” Of course a million brilliant comebacks entered my mind. After the fact. In the moment I was simply so dumbfounded by the comment that I had nothing to say.

Perhaps the best thing I learned, however, is that people can be deliciously gifted in not noticing the obvious. I was working one day, busily sewing buttons to cards (we had to look busy even when the store was empty because this would make “CORPORATE” happy) when someone rang the customer bell. I walked over and began checking the man’s items out. Suddenly he said, “Well, aren’t you going to stand up while you do that?” Bear in mind, now, that at the cash register I had a five-inch tall platform I stood on, so this gentleman had actually watched me grow 5 inches right in front of his eyes. Also bear in mind that I had walked, using my two legs, over to where he was. Unfortunately, and I assure you, much to my chagrin, even standing on a slightly elevated platform, I was still short. So short, in fact, that a man thought I was sitting in an invisible chair whilst ringing him out.

Do not be confused. Do not feel deceived. Even though I am not as tall as you are when I stand all the way up, I can assure that yes…I am really standing. Believe it or not.