This is a picture of MyKid fooling around in my down winter coat. I've had this coat since before MyKid was born. In fact, as I've often related to him, when he was a baby I carried him around in a BabyBjorn while wearing this coat.
MyKid is now 11. Seeing him in this coat, I suddenly realized I've lived my entire adult life at the height of an 11-year old boy.
It's a sobering thought. I could riff for pages on what it's like to be the shortest kid in the class, the shortest woman in an office, and then the shortest oldest woman in an office. What I can't do, however, is tell you how many times people haven't seen me in a line, or in the subway, because I disappear behind much taller people.
I think it's part of the reason I felt so at home in Jerusalem. My height was just not that unusual there. (I also feel comfy on the Canal Street subway station in Manhattan, for the same reason.)
I guess this is just a time that I'm taking stock and trying to figure out where I will fit in in the work world, when I finally return.
One last note -- if you're of a certain age, or you ever visited/lived in the Catskills, you must see Ang Lee's movie, Taking Woodstock. It's a joy. Lee is such a talented director; he totally "got" the time and the place.
You'll be awash in nostalgia and cry for our loss of innocence. Sorry, let me restate that. What I meant by that pathetically inadequate and hopelessly trite sentence was: the movie brilliantly represents a time and a mood that some of you might recognize. Watching it, I felt sad for how innocent we were then and for the youthful optimism we lost, and how we lost it.
I remember listening to older people speak about things and wonder what they might have experienced in life that enabled them to understand life so much better than I did. What had made the world so much more transparent for them? Then, I seemed to understand so little of what was happening around me; I was clueless about how people operate and think.
Experience and T-I-M-E changed all that.