The people you meet have trouble seeing you at all, sometimes, if you have just one sufficiently noticeable physical trait to obscure everything else about you. I'm tall--not basketball tall, not the tallest person you've seen in a month, just tall enough to be a little unusual, a little shy of six-foot-five. But that's enough. Somehow that fact alone suffices to define me entirely for people who know me casually. Or maybe it's just a mnemonic; Robin's the tall guy, okay, I can remember that.
I'm in sort of the third tier of tall people; we're taller than anybody else in the room most of the time, but we all know a handful of people as tall as we are and a few who are distinctly taller. We get a lot of tall jokes and our our often diminutive mothers take a certain professional pride in us, but it's possible to get used to it after a while. In a large crowd there will be enough others of nearly equal height that we won't stand out so much.
Taller than us, though, are the six-eight to six-ten crowd, lummoxes at whose eye-level thyroids ordinary people look askance; they can never be allowed to forget their stature for a day, and they may go for months even in large urban centers without looking up at anyone. Anyone taller than them gets drafted automatically into either the NBA or the specialized-extra pool in Hollywood--or else simply has the prefix "Tall" attached permanently to his first name. (Radio personality Tall Steve of Bloomington, Indiana, we salute you.)
Shorter than me are the six-foot-plus men who are legitimately tall, generally the tallest in their immediate families; they are accustomed to thinking of themselves as towering men, unaware how blessed they are to be merely tall, in an inconspicuous way. These men are always careful to acknowledge the greater height of someone like me, but when overhearing some comment about tall men will forgetfully take it as applicable to themselves even when I stand by.
Topping out a little under them are the almost six feet tall, a certain subset of whom are forever wistful for the distinction of that all-important number six. They will often fudge the facts and assume the mantle falsely if it seems near enough to be believed. But alas, they are not tall, and no amount of weightlifting or wearing of hip clothes will make them so. The truth is that they're probably better off as they are, but some of them will never see it. If these people are serious about being tall they should go to Japan.
(I'm talking about men, here, of course, and American men in particular. A woman of my height is a tremendous rarity; I've seen three in my life, only one of whom did not show tell-tale signs of an overactive thyroid. I won't speak to the ups and downs of being a tall woman because I know all too little about them.)
Height has had a certain cachet for thousands of years; old heroes are almost always tall (so are a lot of the villains, of course). Not that height makes such a great index of overall size, in practice, let alone ferocity or whatever--but somehow we all seem to be wired to have a little innate respect for anybody we have to look up at. Only the most ungainly scrawniness, or the most miserable posture, can overcome that deference entirely.
That, at least, is useful, and I invoke it fairly often. Never in my life have I been in anything that could have been called a fight. But I make a fairly conscious practice of confronting obnoxious people in public--egregiously shoving subway riders, in-theater cell phone users, bullies in general--and it pays to be imposing, to be able to loom properly. I think a lot of the people I have these little disputes with are pretty sure I'm a cream puff (they're probably right) but nobody ever quite wants to take a chance on it. A little attitude and a little altitude will back down most angry people most of the time.
For this, height is useful. Also for reaching high shelves, being located in crowded rooms, and theoretically (were I in possession of any other relevant talents) playing basketball. And that's about it.
The rest is mostly an ongoing saga of not fitting into things. Houses in general are bad; low doorways and perilously dipping ceilings over stairways are bad, and washing dishes at a sink lower than my waist is bad. Hanging plants and light fixtures are bad. Ceiling fans are worse. Cars, you may or may not have noticed, are generally designed to carry children, and only children, in their back seats. Even the front seats, though, are not built to accomodate height, even my moderately unusual height. No matter how far the seat may slide or tilt--never enough anyway--the wheel remains stubbornly fixed almost directly above the pedals. But my legs are longer than my arms--and that difference is greater for me than it is for a smaller person. So my knees will always be bent, jammed into the door, bearing too much weight at all the wrong angles, unless some seat allows me to almost straighten them--thereby sliding me so far back that I can no longer reach the wheel. All of this I am used to, but on a trip of a thousand miles (which in every other respect I love taking) it eventually becomes an intolerable torture.
Worse than all of this is mass transportation. Airplanes are murderous--I haven't sat by the window for years, much as I would love to, because I need to be able to straighten my knees periodically, if only at the steep and awkward angle provided by the aisle. Trains are worse and Greyhound (of which I have vast and uniformly regrettable experience) is the worst of all. Even at rest, fully upright, the seat in front of my seat touches my knees, and narrowly constricts the possible configurations of my lower legs with the floor. The next seat forward is barely as far from the back of my seat as the length of my thighs. And invariably the person who sits in that seat wishes to recline, often abruptly and with violence. Some have mistaken the tangible reality of my knees for an inadequately oiled mechanism, and attempted to compensate by pushing harder. I have bodily shoved more than one passenger back into the upright position, but to no avail; since the seat (God knows why) is equipped to tilt back into the already narrow space behind it, each passenger regards that tilt to be an inalienable right, on which the presence of another passenger in the next seat back has no bearing.
While I'm at it, I should mention that those phony struts on rollercoasters--the beams that bear no weight but simply hang nearby where it looks like you'll hit them--they scare the bejeezus out of me, in a slightly more explicit and considered way than they're supposed to. I know that people forget about me when they design things.
There are perks, of course. There's a kind of unspoken camaraderie between tall people; a number of my closest friends are about my height. I usually claim that this is because I meet tall people more often overall, as they are simply easier to see. They also tend to walk as fast as I do, which is a nice touch. As much as anything, though, it's nice to hang out with people to whom I look pretty normal.