Height hath its privileges. Everyone remembers, growing up,
that one well-meaning old lady who took an unfortunate liking to you and
regularly placed her face in close proximity to yours, often with the
dreadful purpose of planting a kiss on the cheek that she could so
easily reach. In retrospect I see that Mrs. Wilson was a well-mannered,
warm-hearted lady who genuinely liked me. Her sterling qualities were
quite lost on me at the time. 'Twas with exceeding joy that I
discovered one day that while she was affixed at one unchanging
altitude, I was doing a passable imitation of a redwood tree. After
just a few years, I had succeeded in escaping vertically from her dire
clutches. She still came well within my Western notion of personal
space, but my bending down for a kiss was clearly out of the question,
and she decided (quite prudently, I thought) that kissing my chest was
not a viable option.
Copyright 1995 Jonathan Sjørdal
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