Shrinking

I’m shrinking. Ever since my first driver’s license I’ve been listing my height as 5’ 10”. My passport, although expired, shows my height as 5’10”. Every time I give blood they ask me my height and weight. Every time I just put down 5’ 10”. I’ve never had any reason to suspect otherwise. At my last physical I don’t remember them measuring my height. I think I just told them I was 5’10” and the nurse thought it was close enough that she didn’t challenge me.

We last night I was helping Noah with his homework. The task was to get a handful of measurements and than make comparative analysis. How high in feet is the ceiling in your kitchen? How tall is the kitchen table? How many tables could you stack on top of each other in your kitchen? Part of his comparisons was to measure your reach from finger tip to finger tip and then compare this to your height. He choose to measure me. Rock climbers refer to this ratio of reach to height as a “gape index”. Since I have always been just slightly taller than my reach I have always had a negative “gape index”. Better climbers have a slightly longer reach than their height giving them a positive “gape index”.

So last night as I stood with my back against the wall I was fully expecting Noah to confirm my height as 5’10”. Not So. I had him measure me twice and them Victoria double checked him. I am now only 5’8 ½” tall. I’m shrinking!!

I know that in ’97 when I broke my left leg I lost a little bit of height. My left femur is now about 3/4” shorter than it was before I broke it. Since my right leg didn’t get shorter I assume that this would average out to about a 3/8” loss of height. Okay, I can accept that. But where did the other 1 1/8” go? Oh well I guess I’m just going to have to chalk it up to getting older. Not that it really matters. At the rate my oldest is growing he’ll be taller than me sometime next month whether I’m 5’8 ½” or 5’10”.