A fun but 'short' visit

 My best friend from college, Steve, broke quarantine in Minnesota and visited the Black Hills with his wife last week. I met him for lunch in Hill City and then we roamed the streets. Talked non-stop for about three hours. It was great.

He’s in the small circle of close friends of mine. I have fewer than 10 people in my life whose opinion of me I actually care about. He’s one of them. He knows where the bodies are buried and would lend me his shovel to bury another. The two of us can talk the usual BS guy-talk but also get into deeper subjects, like aging parents, us aging, wives, kids, politics. Just like the old days, minus the bottle of vodka and Breakfast Club playing in the VCR for the 100th time. As they say, he gets me. Few do.

He’s also one of the few people who still calls me by my college nickname: Coz. Don’t even remember how I got that. For a short while I was “Speed.” Don’t ask. I liked that one, but it never stuck. Coz did. 

We took the obligatory selfie in front of a chainsaw-carved bear in Hill City and texted it to the third member of our college trio who was still under armed guard in his home outside Minneapolis. It took us a while as two old guys can do trying to get a decent photo of the two of us and the bear. When it was done, I was surprised by one thing – how short I appeared.

Being short is nothing new for me. I was one of the youngest in my grade growing up. Combined with being a late bloomer anyway, I was always six inches shorter than anyone in my class. Until my senior year. Then, as my dad had been telling me but whom I was beginning to doubt, I grew. By my freshman year in college I was 6-2. No longer short!

So what did this genius do in college? I befriended two of the tallest guys in my class, both basketball players, both 6-7.

Steve told me once that I’d apparently caught the eye of some vision-impaired or hard-up co-ed who had asked him: “Who’s that short guy you’re always hanging around?”

Rather than being flattered, and fresh off a long bout with short-man’s syndrome, I replied: “Short!? I’m six-foot-two!”

But there I was, the short guy again. And it reared its ugly head again in the selfie we took 35 years later. It even appeared Steve had grown another inch and I’d shrunk an inch. How’d that happen?