THE LONG AND SHORT OF AGING

I made a shocking discovery the other day. Somewhere, somehow, I’ve lost nearly two inches in height.

For as long as I can remember, I was always 5’7” and considered to be tall. In grade school, I towered over most of the boys, which made it difficult for me to find a dance partner whose head I couldn’t use for a chin rest.

And every time photos were taken of me with the kids in my junior-high class, I always seemed to be standing next to the tiniest guy there, Charlie Groleau (I always thought his last name was kind of ironic, considering his small stature), so I’d usually end up looking as if I should be living at the top of a beanstalk and shouting, “Fee fi fo fum!”

Dating also was difficult because most of the guys who asked me out were about 5’6” tall. I loved to wear high heels because I thought they made my chunky legs look longer and slimmer. Add to the fact that teased, beehive hairstyles were all the rage back then, and I ended up being about 6’1”.

My dad loved to tease me whenever I brought home a guy who was vertically challenged.

“Another one that you can eat peanuts off the top of his head!” Dad, right on cue, would joke after the guy had gone home.

I, however, failed to see the humor in the peanuts comment. Dad never changed the food to something else like French fries or Oreos. With him, it was always peanuts I could eat off the guy’s head.

Still, I wasn’t about to wear flat hair and flat shoes for any guy, not unless I wanted to show him just how chunky my legs really were or how fat my head was. Teased hair, after all, was a great camouflage for my oversized head because no one could tell how much actually was hair and how much was head.

When my friend Alice suggested I let her fix me up on a blind date with her fiance’s best friend, the first thing I asked was how tall he was. She answered with, “Oh, he’s sooooo cute! Dark hair, dark eyes, a great physique! And he’s such a nice guy, too!

“How tall is he?” I repeated.

“And he has a good job and a nice car, and he’s generous beyond words!”

“His height!” I shouted. “How tall is he?”

“Um, about 5’8”, give or take an inch.”

I rolled my eyes. Would I ever be able to wear my 3-inch heels on a date without feeling like Zita, Queen of the Amazons?

Luckily, the blind date turned out to be very casual, so I wore jeans and sneakers. And Alice turned out to be right. The guy was everything she’d said he was, and more. Less than a year later, I was out buying a wedding gown.

Even though I opted to wear only three-quarter-inch heels for the wedding, between my teased hair and the puffy wedding veil, I still was about two inches taller than my husband-to-be.

“I have an idea!” I told him a couple weeks before the wedding. “You can get some lifts to put in your shoes, and then we’ll be the same height!”

The look he gave me made me feel as if I’d just suggested something that qualified as grounds for a divorce before we even got married.
“You mean you want me to wear shoes with high heels on them so I’ll look like one of those flamenco dancers?” he asked.

“No, I’m talking about lifts,” I said. “They’re like thick, hard cushions you put inside your shoes to make you taller. No one can see them, so no one will even know you’re wearing them!”

So on our wedding day, my husband, wearing lifts in his rented shoes, walked down the aisle. He looked much taller, but the only problem was the lifts made his feet rise right out of his shoes by nearly two inches. So the backs of the shoes kept flopping because they had nothing to grab on to. As a result, they made clippity-clop noises whenever he walked. It sounded as if I were marrying a Clydesdale.

Our wedding photos, however, looked great.

But a funny thing happened after we got married. My husband shot up to over 5’10” within the first two years. Suddenly I could wear high heels and tease my hair and still look directly into his eyes. His explanation was he was just a late bloomer.

But now, over 40 years later, because I’m shrinking, he has close to five inches over me, which gives him a huge sense of satisfaction. In fact, just the other day he told me he still has the lifts he wore at our wedding and I could borrow them if I’d like.

And then he said he was going to go buy some peanuts.

ARCHAEOLOGISTS WILL FIND MY SNEAKERS

I admire people who love to grow things and can turn their yards into replicas of the Botanical Gardens. I however, am stuck facing another spring with my yard resembling the La Brea Tar Pits.

Never has so much mud collected in one spot. Walking out there in anything less than knee-high boots all but guarantees you’ll have your shoes sucked right off your feet. I swear there are at least two pairs of my sneakers buried somewhere in the subterranean depths of the yard, never to be seen again during my lifetime. In the distant future, archaeologists will unearth my sneakers and display them in a museum.

It’s not that I haven’t tried to grow a lush green lawn. Last year alone, I purchased enough grass seed to cover Fenway Park. Then I spent countless hours raking the yard, leveling it and ridding it of rocks and debris so I could seed it.

The only problem was I didn’t know how to water it.

For most people, watering the lawn is a simple thing. They attach one end of a hose to an outdoor faucet and the other end to a sprinkler of some sort and voila!, the lawn gets watered. Unfortunately, in my case it’s not quite that simple.

Because the water in our well tested so high for arsenic I could have made lemonade with it and used it as a lethal weapon, we had to have a complicated water filtration system installed in our basement. It has something to do with osmosis and uses a product called Pot Perm, and makes a washing-machine kind of noise when it’s doing its thing. It also has to be regularly checked by a professional water person to keep it in top condition.

The last time the water person came over he happened to mention that whenever I water the lawn I should bypass the filtration system so as not to abuse it.

“All you have to do,” he said, “is turn this, flip this and shut that.”

It looked easy when he did it, but the minute he left the house, I completely forgot what to flip and what to turn. All I ended up doing was shutting off the water completely. So I decided to quit fiddling with the filtrations system and just wait for the rain to water my grass seed.

I waited a long time. The end result, after three weeks or so, was about 30 small clumps of grass spread out over the entire yard. The clumps were green for about a week, then they shriveled up, turned brown and died a slow and agonizingly painful death.

I tried again, using Kentucky bluegrass seed. I figured if anything would give me a long, lush lawn, that would be it.

Once again I got clumps, only these were longer and stragglier. They looked like big green fright wigs sprinkled all over the ground.

This year, however, my problems are much worse. Not only is there no grass at all, the yard is sinking. A wide trench suddenly appeared and caused the fence gate to go lopsided and pop open. I now have a bungee cord holding it in place. The trench then snaked its way over to the back porch and swallowed two of the legs, causing everything to tilt to the right. Only people who have one leg shorter than the other will be comfortable standing on our porch.

But because of the all the snow we had this winter, which eventually melted into 10,000 gallons of water, the yard now has transformed into 2,000 square feet of mud. And this is no ordinary mud. It’s mud that’s possessed by evil spirits.

I swear that the minute my dogs set one paw out there, the demon mud flings itself onto them, savagely clinging to every bit of fur on their bodies as it cackles maniacally. It also entices them to dig deep holes in it and fling it all over the side of the house.

When I open the door to let the dogs back inside, only their eyes are visible. The rest of their body parts are covered with mud. And their noses have such big clumps on them, they look like clown noses.

I spent the better part of last week trying to remember what the real color of my floors is.

Still, I’m not about to attempt to fill the trench, rake the mud or plant grass seed again. No, I’m throwing in the towel, raising the white flag, admitting defeat.

Besides that, I figure I can make a small fortune renting out the yard for monster truck mud-bog races.