Friday, August 11, 2006
Measuring Up
Impossibly, it’s time for school again – time to haul out all those chestnuts about how much everyone has grown over the summer. But, you know, it really is true that you can sometimes hardly recognize last June’s kids in the browned and lean August bodies of the returning students.
Crazy growth spurts seem especially fitting this summer, with the late July heat wave and heavy rains that have turned our tomato patches into jungles and shot our hollyhocks up to tickle the eaves of our garages. Like zucchinis, school kids have surged overnight from tender babies to overgrown adolescents, and it’s just as puzzling to deal with a club-sized squash as it is a teenager. When did teens get so big, with their jutting Adam’s apples, gunboat shoes, and breasts that pop out as suddenly as Growing Up Skipper’s used to, with one backward crank of her plastic arm?
My own growth spurt screeched to a halt when I turned 12, so I’m eyeballing my newly 7th-grade daughter enviously, as she busily passes me up in the “marks on the wall” department. Sure, it’s nice we can trade shoes, for the moment at least – her cherry red Crocs are so much more rockin’ than my cushioned Clark’s – but I can see she’ll soon be patting me on the head and asking me condescendingly about what’s new at the Lollipop Guild.
Even though I’m 40, like many “vertically challenged” people, I still suffer the misapprehension that taller folks surely must be older, more powerful, more ... grown up. After all, English is full of belittling references to smallness. In a country that produces Hummers and 36-oz Slurpees, it’s never a good thing to be “small-minded” or “sold short,” much less “short-sheeted.” A shrimp may be welcome on the edge of a chilled cocktail glass, but not in a school hallway. I still identify with all those children’s books about the revenge of the tiny; it’s no surprise little kids are comforted by getting-even stories about elves, fairies, and clever mice who outwit hulking cats who are so clearly the nasty grownups.
A few years ago, I had fresh insight into the devotion of middle-school boys to the Lord of the Rings epic when I watched a team of 5th grade girls beat the pants off the boys over and over in a tug-o-war challenge. At that age, the girls have shot so far ahead of the boys that they don’t look like a different sex, they look like a different species. It was the amazons versus the hobbits, and the hobbits didn’t stand a chance. Small wonder, then, that tweenage boys cling to the promise lovely Geladriel makes to wee Frodo Baggins, that “Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.” Middle school boys bask in the sweet justice when, at the end of the trilogy, everyone, even the macho king, bows to the four hobbits who have saved Middle Earth. The disparity kids feel between the enormity of their feelings and the smallness of their bodies is a source of constant frustration.
And now that I’m the grown-up, I’m experiencing the flip side of this phenomenon – the strangeness that my body doesn’t record my inner growth. Most of my middle-aged peers are accomplishing so much more real change and growth than we did in earlier decades, when our bodies claimed we were growing fastest. I mean, did any of us really grow up in junior high or high school, when our bodies did? And who has time in early adulthood to grow when you’re psychotically sleep-deprived from having babies, or trying frantically to get a career started? It’s now in mid-life that many of us have a bit of breathing space to stretch ourselves, to try new things. It’s now that we’re being shaken in new ways, by the deaths of parents and peers, by job changes sought after or thrust upon us ... it’s now that I see my friends and I growing in ways that are profound, even if you can’t mark and measure them on a wall.
A while ago, I overheard a towering matron with an Eastern European accent reassure a petite woman about the virtues of being small. “You know vat they say,” she instructed warmly, “Big woman, made for work; little woman, made for love.” At the time, I tucked this gem away to make me feel smug about my own slight stature, but now that my physical growth is over, I wonder if that’s the new kind of mark we’re all straining toward – stretching ourselves for love. Who knows if we can ever measure up to that standard? And with apologies to Shakespeare, I’m not sure love really is an “ever fixed mark.” I hope, though, love remains a mark we continually tippy-toe to reach, growing immeasurably better, if not taller, with every invisible inch.