Dear Diary: Concussion
I was walkiing along First Avenue this afternoon, with Quatorze, when BAM! my head struck something. It was the transverse pole of some scaffolding that a group of turbaned South Asians were assembling — almost certainly in non-compliance with code. Angry as always when my head is struck, I forged on a few steps and BAM! it happened again. “Don’t you people have any brains?” I shouted at the silent men, who had done nothing to warn me as I blundered in their midst. Then I continued walking, but not without an upward glance to rule out further hazards.
For twenty minutes or so, my eyes felt a bit odd — just a bit, as if focusing them were a problem. But I don’t think that a trip to the hospital (quite close by, as it happened) would have been helpful.
It astonishes me that most people aren’t as tall as I am — something of an understatement. It seems grotesquely unfair that they’re not. I never think of being tall as an advantage, and I shouldn’t care to be any taller. If everyone stood to about seventy-five inches, that would be the end of many tight corners, and I’d find the world somewhat more accommodating. There’s something very handy about my height. Everybody ought to have it.
My mother, who was five-eight, used to exhort me to “go out and find a nice tall queen and make her happy.” My suppressed inward jeer at her ignorance of the popular meaning of “queen” masked, but was also prompted by, the irritation that anyone would feel by such erotic dictation. Of course my mother didn’t mean anything erotic. She was much too sentimental to give much thought to the particularity of love. She expected me to be content with a gallant’s role — that is what men were for. It took forever to outgrow the rather unnatural oafishness that I assumed in self-protection.
In the event, my abiding bond has been with a rather short woman, someone over a foot shorter than I am. She would certainly like to be as tall as I am; she has said so many times. But I’m afraid that if my dear Kathleen were as tall as I am, then I’d be expecting her to bring me tea and toast in the morning, instead of the other way round. Â