Remembering three foot seven

 

We measure our growth via shoes, clothes, the visits to the doctors office, the photographs (our first grade class, our high school senior class): but though man is the measure of all things, who among these men and women remember growth from the inside? We, after all, were there, in the growing body. I was once a twenty pound thing. I was once a first grader, about a yard and seven inches tall.  That was the summit from which I surveyed the world.  But how I got to that height and beyond it – this is like the mystery of the holy ghost. The track of my track – if I am the measurer, why is it that these inches and feet seem to have come to me from the outside?

Or at least this is my experience. It is a confusing experience. I can describe, for instance, something that happened to me when I was six. I was with other kids, and we were taunting some kid who had moved into the house catty corner from us. This I can remember, but I remember it in an odd space, bi-located – surely I saw it as I was then, at that height, but I remember it vaguely as an onlooker, outside myself. That X, or I, marks the spot. But when memory digs in that X, the I it recovers is handed to the I that recovered it, and neither of them are quite satisfied with this finders keepers arrangement.