Height

“How tall did you used to be?” A doctor asked a friend of ours that question a few years ago. I know what the doctor meant, since I’m now two inches shorter than I used to be. Like everyone else who grows older, the disks between the bones in my back have slowly become compressed, and osteoporosis has done its part too.

None of this really matters – it’s too late to compete in a Mister America contest – except that I think of myself as taller than I am. When an upper cabinet door in our kitchen is open, I automatically duck when I walk under it, even though, if I stood as straight as possible, my head would not touch it at all. I suppose the same mechanism is at work when I surprise the old man I find in the mirror.

In these reactions, I’m like the blue penguins of New Zealand, the smallest penguins in the world. We watched them one evening, years ago, when they returned from a day’s hunting at sea. They straggled across the beach and up a steep bank and waited until they had formed a critical mass, before racing over the open space to their nesting burrows in the rocky hill above. Their massing together and their subsequent dash would protect them from the eagle that once preyed on them, but today that behavior is of no use at all. The eagle has long been extinct.

Just as the penguins never noticed that the eagle had gone away, .I paid no attention as those two inches slowly disappeared. So I duck when I can stand straight and think I’m young until I pass a mirror.