The Big Kid

On why Being Tall and Strong is Awesome

It’s fitting that I began life as a joke.

I entered this world at Grays Harbor Community hospital, in the city of Aberdeen that would come to shape so much of my early life experience, on April Fool’s Day. At the moment of my birth, I was two feet tall and weighed over eleven pounds. Everyone assumed it was a prank when my dad called around to share the news. For those without much child-rearing experience, that’s a size most boys don’t hit for several months.

My growth only accelerated from there.

It’s important to pause a moment and say that I am not staggeringly tall as an adult. I’m six foot two. While that puts me in something like top four-percent of male height, what is more unusual is that I hit my adult height at thirteen years of age. For all of my earliest, most formative experiences, I was comically larger than everyone else in my age cohort. I was the Clifford the Big Red Dog of grade-schoolers.

This isn’t going to be a story about how sad it is to be tall, unless being tall is sad in the same way that it’s sad to have super powers. Oh, no! What will I do now that I’m much stronger than everyone else around me! What do you mean I can reach any shelf in a store? Being in obvious possession of a sought after trait is so crushing! See? It just doesn’t work mapped onto real life. Everyone knows that being tall is great.

My sister beat the crap out of me every day for most of my young life, but when I got to school I had the super-validating realization that I could very easily fight eight other kids at once. This bore out in numerous wrestling matches with my friends, where to keep things fun everyone else tried to fight me collectively. The strength scaling between myself and my peers was something like Captain America versus a normal person. When I got to kindergarten, I stood eye to eye with almost all of the sixth-graders. By first grade I was as tall as all of the female teachers, and by second grade I was about as tall as most of the male teachers. School, instead of being a place for fear and feeling like I would get mobbed by other children, was a place I could go to in order to feel like Superman.

This had many hilarious consequences.

Children’s clothes almost never ran in my size. When my grandfather put me in cub scouts, I could only wear the uniform for the first year and even then the buttons were barely enough to hold that tiny piece of cloth together across my massive chest. It was so restricting that I felt like Bruce Banner transforming into the Incredible Hulk, where I would only need one muscle flex to destroy all of my clothes. I’m sure I looked like a circus bear to everyone else. Shoes were impossible to find by the time I made it to junior high school, and when talking to other people of my size and age, we all seem to have found the exact same pair of white New Balance shoes. These were the only shoes in America available in size thirteen for something like a decade. In short order, I went clothes shopping with my grandfather and began to dress like a sixty-five year old man in the finest styles available from the L.L. Bean Men’s section.

Games had to be modified to account for my presence, usually with the introduction of some kind of slaughter rule. For instance, it very shortly became impossible for even several other children to beat me in a game of tug-of-war and so some rough equivalence had to be found before the game could begin and my side had to be disadvantaged accordingly. In one game, it was me versus the rest of my scouting troop and I still won. When my grandfather enrolled me into Karate classes, the instructor took one look at me and instantly moved me into the teen classes… while in the second grade. It was awkward, but it at least had the effect of humbling me. The humbling wasn’t as profound as it could have been because my Kempo instructor, who would strangely go on to win the lottery, made me promise to never ever hit another child for any reason. Multiple adult men gathered around to impress upon me the seriousness of my strength. At only eight years old, I had punched a high-school sophomore in the stomach while we both wore full sparring gear and the match had to be called off. In a grave and serious manner my instructor assured me that I could seriously hurt or kill someone if I wasn’t careful. I instantly felt ten feet tall. My sparring partners were less pleased, because they had to fight a little kid that looked like a young buffalo had been accidentally transformed into a human being by magic. Nobody wants to be a fifteen year old losing a sparring match to an eight year old.

Funniest of all was how often I would be mistaken for an adult, although this only began to happen in the later grades. Puberty started for me in something like third grade, which was super awkward because everyone else was still definitely a kid and my voice started cracking doing music lessons. I went into some crazy hormonal overdrive in sixth grade where my upper lip was quite sure it wanted a mustache and I was quite sure I didn’t, so I had to shave twice a day. If I didn’t shave quickly, I would have dark, if uneven, five o’clock shadow. When new staff or new substitute teachers came to school they would almost always ask me what I was doing in the class. Several times I was sent to the office or the school secretary would have to explain over the intercom that I was actually still a little kid. Once, a mom who was volunteering in another classroom took it upon herself to keep me in from recess and yell at me that I needed to get back over to the high school and stop f—ing around. At summer camp, I was inadvertently rounded up into a private meeting of the camp counselors and it took a few days for people to realize I was actually one of the campers. By high school it was regularly assumed that I was a substitute teacher and the actual substitute would often try to figure out which one of us had the wrong class.

In college, I remember everyone in one of my engineering courses arguing about how we were going to move a giant container of distilled water. Several proposed we create some kind of pulley system and I just… picked it up and moved it over to a cart. It only weighted a few hundred pounds and for me that’s not unthinkable. Another time, everyone complained about some dick-hole English professor who liked to ride his bike through students at high speed to make them scatter out of his way. This was super dangerous but he was ill-tempered so nobody wanted to get on his bad side. So, I just stood there and let him hit me. I didn’t even fall down, only staggered a bit. And before he could unload any five dollar words on me, I apologized to him for him having hit me in a way that was clearly his fault, and helped him up and brushed him off and he stopped doing that from then on. One thing I’ve enjoyed my whole life is that by the time I grew up, very few people are able to intimidate me physically. I even got to beat up my abusive, stepfather! How many people would kill for that kind of opportunity?

I suppose this was all some sort of Medieval Slavic genetic code, executing a rapid growth cycle so that I could sire children before being taken away from my village to serve the Ottoman Empire as a janissary soldier-slave. Or maybe so that I could serve my family as a farm animal. God knows that I could have easily replaced a horse on a plough by the time I was nine or ten. In the modern world it meant that I got to do things like help people move mattresses up staircases at a young age, or use a laundry bag in a pillow fight.

For whatever reason, I got to be the Big Kid, and I got to pass the Big Kid genes onto my eldest son. At his three year check-up appointment, Dutch was already more than three and a half feet tall. The other day he got grumpy on a playground because he was trying to figure out how to play with kids his own size, except all those kids are six or seven years old. It’s getting harder and harder to keep him in age appropriate clothes and people always assume he’s older. He’s also crazy strong for his age and when he was only one-and-a-half, he ripped one of the baby gates out of the dry-wall. When I see the growth charts and see him above the 99th percentile line, I feel like I’ve performed the greatest moral good in the universe. Which is stupid, but I still feel it.

There isn’t sad point to this post or a melancholy ending, and I think that’s the actual point I’m trying to make. I write about very sad or very disturbing things sometimes, but my whole life hasn’t been terrible or sad. Nobody’s life is all bad. Not even the worst life you can imagine has no silver linings. This is funny! It’s funny that while I was having a weird life and all those things were going on that I was comically, absurdly large for my age. My life has had lots and lots of silver linings and I do my best to be thankful for them. I hope this makes you think of something that brought you similar joy in your life.