Short and Squat Wins the Day

I am short and squat.

I seem to spend most of my life standing on tiptoe. We have five stepstools scattered throughout the house, plus a neat little toe-kick dealie in the kitchen I devised to give me an extra three inches so I can reach the second shelf of our cabinets without throwing out my back. And there's an actual ladder we store between the wall and refrigerator which I regularly resort to.

It wasn't always this way. As I always say, I was born five feet, four--which made things a little uncomfortable for my mother. I got my growth early and was usually the female steeple on the top row of my elementary class pictures. But it was lonely up there in the stratosphere.

Then, just when the other girls started growing taller and, more important, the boys started shooting up, I stopped growing. By high school, I was on the front row of the school pictures, often toward the end of the line. As an adult, when height is so important, I am, to put it bluntly, short. Five-four used to be average height for a woman, but the number has gone up through the years, just as I've gone down. Yes, I'm only about five-two now. And all my length is in my body; my arms and legs are short, and the weight accumulates in my belly, betraying my ancestry--I'm built for winter famines in northeastern Europe.

I console myself with the knowledge that if a new Ice Age sweeps the country, I'm more likely to survive than those tall, long-limbed, bikini-clad models whose hands and feet are half a mile away from their bodies.

But, to tell the truth, I'd rather be the tallest girl in the class again.