Loved by a lover of dwarves
Thursday a friend asked if I loved or love-loved her. Sunday I was driving down the street and, in my rearview mirror, saw the friend walking her dog; I recognized that she was with her boyfriend, whom I have never met. Now here is the notable part of the story. Her boyfriend looked tiny, maybe four feet tall. I stopped my car in the middle of the street to get a better look. I was headed downhill, and they were partially covered by cars and trees, so I could not see clearly—I never saw him head-to-toe, just a head floating above the tiny dog—but the boyfriend was much shorter than my friend, and she is about 5’4”.
It is a dwarf or me. Is this my lot in life, to be loved by a lover of dwarves? Am I even more culturally marginal than I understood? Do I have “special needs”?
L. said: “I mean, I don’t know her, it could be a number of things, and I can’t tell if you were being tongue-in-cheek, but I don’t think you should question something like your lot in life based on one woman’s apparently diverse taste in men.” I agree with L. in theory, and her response resembles something I might say when I am speaking from my most abstract mode—I especially like the feminist flavor of “one woman’s apparently diverse taste in men”—but entering into a public romantic relationship with a dwarf would entail a willingness to have strangers think, “Oh, isn’t that sweet! That pretty girl is dating a little person,” and when I imagined myself as a recipient of that charitableness of someone’s affection, it felt so uncomfortable, it felt like an acknowledgement that something is—not unappealing exactly but—challenging about me.
This post is starting to seem harsh about dwarves, so let me assert my beliefs that
- my immediate emotional reaction seemed to devalue dwarves but was actually claiming some kinship with their outsider status;
- all love is charitable love undeserved by its recipients, so I am always and only a recipient of that charitableness of someone’s affection; and
- dwarves are fully wonderful, fully capable people, or at least as wonderful and capable as non-dwarves.
I’m intellectualizing it when all I meant to say was, Weird, someone was trying to ditch a dwarf for me. That’s cool, or something. Am I difficult to like?
Kurt Wagner of Lambchop once said during a concert, “We’re a hard band to like, but we’re pretty easy to love.” I have always wanted to imagine people explaining me to their friends that way.
Anyway the question has to remain unresolved, because when I got home last night I checked Facebook, and he’s not a dwarf, he looks 5’10” or something.
