I never expected to fall short.
In sixth grade, I was the tallest, towering over the baby bloomers. Meanwhile my classmate “Jack” worried he might never make 5-foot-4. So hopelessly uncool.
I was already that height and stayed there through high school. That was a great social advantage in those benighted times, when a cardinal dating commandment was The Boy Must Be Taller.
The philosopher Thomas Hobbes, I learned in college, said humans were innately nasty, brutish and short. I was too clumsy to be brutish and too tall to be short – but I could learn to be nasty. That seemed to be my nature.
I wrote savage jokes and lampoons for the school newspaper. I wrote vicious letters to the editor, including an attack on the Cleveland Indians, published in Sports Illustrated when I was 15.
Later I became a fierce classroom professor and, as “Ms. Mentor,” I unmasked academia as a world of cruel dog-eat-doggers.
But over decades, I’ve lost height. Four inches.
I am now short, BUT I AM NOT POWERLESS!
I snarl and dream of Napoleon.
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