The club was called the Hartford Heights Tall Club and Erin wanted to know more. She was excited. Always a tall one, coming in at 5-10 1/2, she qualified for the club, a cool half inch over the mandatory 5 feet 10 inches needed to belong.
"How tall are you again?" she asked, already envisioning the tall club as an odd yet intriguing activity we could do together. We would go and hang out with tall people, take hikes with tall people, ride tall bikes with tall people and tell tall jokes with tall people. We would feel so exclusive.
"6-1," I said. I had clearly let her down as she informed me that the cutoff for men was 6-foot-2. I never felt so slight in my life.
We both agreed that I was almost there. In a joking-but-kind-of-serious-at-the-same-time fashion, we discussed lifts for my shoes or how one could go about concealing platform soles. But was all this worth it? Perhaps. For a moment I was extremely excited when I remembered that former NBA star Manute Bol, who stands at a league-record 7-foot-7 lives just down the road in West Hartford.
“Manute Bol has to be a member of the Hartford Heights Tall Club,” I said. “He probably runs the thing.”
The possibilities of hanging with Manute made my shortcomings that much more difficult to deal with.
The first thing that came to mind with a tall club was the Guinness Book of World Records photo of that freakishly tall guy who had some weird elephant disease that sprouted him to a height of 8 and a half feet. I imagined everyone looked like him, standing around in clothes from Big&Tall with size 19 shoes, holding martini glasses that appeared wee in their mammoth hands.
I wondered what could possibly occur at tall club meetings.
They probably hand out awards for best use of height in an act of kindness. A lanky 7-footer steps forward and receives applause for helping a crying child rescue a balloon off a restaurant ceiling. Later, a guy with a crazy-low voice shares with the group about how his hand got caught in a ceiling fan again while he was putting on a sweater and a woman with a head the size of George “The Animal” Steele’s follows with a story about how she was approached at church to play on the interfaith men’s basketball team. Everyone laughs because it’s all happened to them.
Even if I had the extra inch to meet their tall standards, could I go through with it?
To join a tall club, it seems that being tall would have to be a large part in how you define yourself as a person. You wear tall clothes, you have to duck under doorways, people ask if you played college hoops, short people have their pictures taken with you. These are all experiences that revolve around your height and you want to share them with those of like proportion with similar experiences. It seems only natural. Except that, even though I’m only an inch from joining, I’m far from defining myself as tall.
I don’t even consider the tall cutoff of 6-foot-2 tall for a man. You’d have to be at least 6-foot-4 before you’re tall in my tall book. And I realize my wife is tall for a woman, but 5-foot-10 doesn’t seem tall enough for a tall club either. For me, a woman has to be at least 6 feet before I say “Wow, she’s tall.”
And although I bet there might be one or two 7-footers at the Hartford Heights tall club, I doubt there are any whacky-hormone world record holders. That, of course, I’d pay to see.
In the meantime, you can be sure that I’ll be on the lookout for Manute Bol . . . or any other 7-foot-7, 140-pound men for that matter.
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