Tall Tales

By Stan Davis

After publishing fourteen professional books, Stan wrote
Tall Tales to leave a legacy for subsequent generations, as
a human annuity, as a mark of his post-retirement work,
and as a way of taking stock. Its done in four genresmemoir,
essay, fi ction and poetry-and grouped by theme, with sections on his personal life, work life, his thoughts on religion, ten fi ctional tales, and two intermezzi with some poems. Thats it. Have fun.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 21, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465375254

Book preview

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

Before we’re adults, we wonder if our parents were ever young. By the time we’re adults, we’re so busy working and raising our own children that we often aren’t interested in our parents’ lives. This sometimes lasts until near their deaths, when our interests get renewed. When we become interested in what our grandparents’ lives were like, often they’re already gone. When parents or grandparents are very old, we may think of sitting them down in front of a video recorder and asking them about their past. But most of us never do this.

A major reason I wanted to put together this book with some of my post-retirement writings is so that succeeding generations of my family may know something about me and others in our family, particularly if they didn’t learn much about the Davis family until now. At 72, most of life is behind me now and, while I hope there are many good years ahead, it seems wise to put this together now while my mental and writing skills are still sharp.

My second purpose in writing this volume is to have it serve as a human annuity, what some call an ‘ethical will’. You will lead your own lives, make your own choices, have your own successes and failures, adventures, fears and hopes. Nevertheless, some problems and turns are universal no matter what generation you’re in, and perhaps some of what I’ve learned or failed to learn may be helpful to you.

A third reason for writing this is that seven decades into life is a good time for taking stock. Who am I? What am I like? Did I become who I wanted to be, when did I come to know what that was and, more important, what is it? What am I proud of and what do I regret? Do I know myself? Do I like myself, and at which ages, in which moments, which circumstances, which behaviors?

There’s a concept in acting called the arc. It’s the path a character or story takes—beginning one way, changing direction and ending in another, transformed by events and experiences along the way. Real people also have an arc. We begin life formed by our DNA, inheritance and surroundings, yet we end with much more, defined by what we gather. My arc could be described in many ways, but if I were to choose one I like best it would be coming to terms with my life, accepting myself for who I am and who I am not. My own taking stock has an arc to it.

A fourth reason is to leave behind a ‘mark of my work.’ We once had a slate walkway installed near our front door by Ned Delacata, a noble looking Italian artisan with a name that sounded like notes on a musical scale. De-la-ca-ta. When it was finished he looked at me and said, You know, that’s my little piece of posterity, the mark of my work that I’ll leave behind. I thought to myself, I write books and probably none of them will outlive me; there’s not much posterity there. What wonderful irony: my professional books have sold more than 1-million copies yet are likely to be quickly forgotten; but this personal volume with universal themes, one that only a few people may have an interest in reading, in the future might get dusted off and read by a descendant who is curious about some long-gone ancestor.

Other marks of my personal work are my needlepoint canvases, a hobby I’ve had for a quarter century. Sewing a needlepoint has always been a calming and meditative activity for me. My canvases will no doubt outlive my books; and if I’m lucky a few will end up as heirlooms rather than on blankets at a yard sale.

This brings me to a fifth reason, added later, after many drafts. The older one gets and the closer to mortality the more many of us realize that we don’t want to be forgotten. The human condition, the greatest topic in literature and religion, is ultimately about how to come to grips with our own mortality, how to find meaning and acceptance of life’s greatest mystery. No small part of wrestling with this problem is how to leave something behind. Children and grandchildren are the common antidote. But how well do they truly know you, know how you feel and think, know how you ached and celebrated over the years, how you coped with fears, failed or succeeded. To put it bluntly, a volume like this is a way for a writer to say to anyone who reads it, I was here.

*

I want to make a brief comment about the organization of this book. The tales are written in four genres—memoir, essay, fiction and poetry—and are grouped by theme. The first section includes pieces from my personal life; the second is about my work life; there are a couple of pieces with my thoughts on religion; a final section has ten fictional tales; and there are two intermezzi with some poems. The rationale for the fiction pieces I selected is that they speak to the essential aloneness of the human condition, a theme I address in the section’s opening essay.

The memoir section contains selected pieces only and is not intended as a complete treatment of my life. I wrote and rewrote extensively about my first marriage and the separation and divorce that followed, for example, but I decided not to include any of those pieces because, no matter how much better the writing became, sensitivities remained. I couldn’t please all the relevant people all the time, so I decided to leave those pieces out. There’s a very short Appendix at the end with my life’s chronology.

That’s it. Have fun.

 $

500 REWARD

During President Bill Clinton’s first-term, Bob Reich was his Secretary of Labor. Bob is less than five feet tall. When he’s introduced at a speech, he walks up to the podium, stands behind it completely hidden and begins speaking, You know, before I came to Washington, I used to be over six feet tall. The audience loves it. I always admired his ability to handle his height with such self-deprecating humor. I never mastered that feat and have been looking for a comparable one-liner for years.

I’m six-foot-seven and have the opposite problem. I cannot spend a day in public without people commenting on my height. I’m guaranteed to get several remarks. Many are obvious and gratuitous, like My, you’re tall. The most frequent is, Did you play basketball? This one throws me more than any other comment. The source of my visceral discomfort goes back to childhood where I was always the last chosen for schoolyard after-school games. Though I looked like a basketball player, I was just an average athlete.

I grew six inches one year in high school, about 1/8 inch per week. That’s almost fast enough to hear the growth. In those days it was called growing pains. I graduated from high school a bit over six-foot-six, weighing a paltry 165 pounds. I wasn’t just tall; I was also incredibly skinny. My arms were so thin I would never wear short-sleeve shirts. During hot days I’d wear long-sleeve shirts and roll up the sleeves so that I always had the option to roll them down if I felt too self-conscious.

I played flute in the school band. Though I enjoyed it and it was good for me, I always felt uncomfortable as this tall skinny kid, in a geeky too-short red and black band uniform, playing such a skinny instrument. I registered for the draft on my eighteenth birthday and got a 4F rating the same day (rejected for physical reasons). The limit was six-foot-six. It was uneconomical to make uniforms, guns and beds for the few people my height.

Unless you shopped in a Tall Man’s Store pretty much nothing was made for you. My size 13 feet are usually one size too big for most shoes and socks, my 36 inch sleeve length is too long except for all but a few choices. The same is true for pants, jackets and ties. Often they make the sleeves long enough but not the body length. Only belts and handkerchiefs are available in abundant choice.

Every doorknob is way too low. I hit my head somewhere almost every other week. In cars, my knees hit the steering column. Seats never go back far enough. Regular beds are too short. Once in a hotel where I had booked a room with a large bed, they put the two queen-size beds in the room head to toe. They were trying to be nice.

At age 35 I had an epiphany. I’m six-foot-seven and cannot change that. My choices were to stand tall and be proud of it or to hunch, slouch and look worse. I got it: I’d be okay if I stood up straight. I imagined a string rising from the top of my head. When I pulled up on the string, I felt pride in myself. I changed my posture.

From the first day I met my wife, Bobbi, she never thought of me as tall. To this day, that fact remains at the core of my love for her. It wasn’t that she liked my height so much as that she never experienced it as unusual or different, just natural. Others close to me accept my height but she thought it was perfect. It’s impossible to overstate how much that has always meant to me.

In my forties Bobbi helped me to solve a serious problem. Because chairs are never built for people my size, sitting on a straight-backed chair in restaurants and meeting rooms becomes painful after a few minutes, and I’m numb from my waist to my toes after fifteen minutes. My wife realized that if I used stackable, caterer-style chairs and stacked one on top of the other, it would change the angle of my bent spine and would relieve my pain. It worked! People see me do this and ask, What’s the matter, you’re not tall enough? Complete strangers have seen me on two chairs and said, You just have to feel superior. I explain that chairs are built for people their height, they’d be pretty uncomfortable in a child’s chair, and that’s how a regular chair feels to me. I have the explanation down pat but it’s the relaxed smile I’m still working on.

Once a man I was speaking to asked me to sit down but I was already seated. Another time I was holding a wine glass when a woman said, You should be holding a tall drink of water. Bizarre. I’ve heard dozens of lines like these. Although I feel assaulted daily by people’s comments about my height, I’m struck by how ordinary most of the remarks are. It’s not as though people say things I haven’t heard before or didn’t know. My wife keeps pointing out that they mean it as a positive. I wish that helped. The truth is, not only do I wish people wouldn’t say these things, even more important, I wish they wouldn’t think them.

It’s similar to a beautiful woman who wants to be loved for who she is and not how she looks. In our society big breasts are well thought of; but it wouldn’t be appreciated if every man and woman who noticed them said, My they’re big or How big are they? That’s how I feel about my height.

Many people carry around negative body images about themselves and I’m no exception. Where these negative images come from matters less than why they’re there and why they’re so tenacious. We think we’re too tall, too short, too fat, too thin, too hairy or too bald, too dark, too ugly, too handicapped, too scarred, too wrinkled, whatever. What is universal is that everyone chooses a particular image of his/her own body and whether or not to make a problem of it; what’s personal is the specific choice we each make.

I’ve often wished that I could come up with as good a line as Bob Reich—a one-liner, usable and appropriate for all occasions—slightly self-deprecating with a twist. I know—I’ll offer a $500 reward for the right line, the perfect, brief, funny reply.

After more than half a century of discomfort about being six-foot-seven, in the fall of 2008, a nurse took my vital statistics at a routine medical checkup. I stepped on the scale; she raised the bar and said, six-five-and-a-quarter. Like most of us at older age, I had shrunk. At the elevator a few minutes later, as usual a man asked me how tall I am. Six-foot-five I said and, $500 richer, I smiled.

GUPPIES AND GIRLS

"Today was the first day of school since christmas and I didnt feel like going to school. I went to fish store. bought 2 guppies & gravel for small tank. Grammar homework hard."

Dismantling my parents’ home in 1998 we found a box with papers, writing and miscellany from my childhood. The earliest was a diary covering a two-month period when I was twelve years old. Unaltered by memory and written at the time the feelings and events described were happening, these are authentic statements of who I was at that age. They reveal a pretty regular kid, one a lot less troubled by things than the ‘me’ I remember.

Today was an ordinary day. School was ase usal. After school I worked on my fish scrapbook. went to scouts meeting. At meeting Harvey kicked me.

I was involved in my tropical fish hobby. In fact it lasted for more than four decades. During the early years I kept a log of my aquaria, mostly about which fish I bought, which gave birth, which died. "The penny sale was at the fish stor today. Dad and I got a 5 1/2 gallon Beta tank . . . I got some guppies with zebra stripes . . . ."

It was important to me to rescue the livebearer babies so the other fish would not eat them. I knew when a mother was due to give birth, and I’d go to great lengths to catch the babies and protect them until they had a fighting chance in the tank. I was interested in ‘the facts of life’, as we called it then, and this had something to do with it. My nurturance and protectiveness also had more than a little to do with the bogeyman of the Nazis and saving helpless creatures from death. WWII had ended six years earlier and still entered my nightmares.

Today was a dress rehersal for the school play and I wasn’t scared at all. During rehersal I tapped Dorothy below the stomach and said ‘I knew something was developing in the utterus’.

During the weekend, I ate lunch at Lindy’s and went to see south Pacific. During the play the actors used the word ‘stingy basterd’ often.

Around that time, I learned something we all discover while growing up: our parents are imperfect. My mother came home from a meeting one night and complained out loud to my grandparents that someone was a bastard. I was supposed to be asleep, but heard her through my closed bedroom door. It came as a great shock to hear her curse.

I came home for lunch and I found out Pa was deathly sick. I can’t use my bathroom because he needs it at all times. They bought a hospital bed for him. I had to sleep with dad. I didn’t get any sleep. Mom took care of papa so she slept in my bed.

My grandfather was the most important person in my life at that point, but this was my only diary entry about him. I was getting interested in girls. They and fish claimed more writing attention.

My blind date to the ice rink wasn’t to hot, and I’m getting more friendly with Frances. I like her and she’s very nice. I sat in the park all day and thought about her. Its known that she and Steve are a couple but I’ll try and take her away from him little by little. Now I only have 1 guppy left. Today I had my first piece of Pizza Pie.

Until then I thought Jews weren’t allowed to eat pizza, that it was trayf, not Kosher. In those days most of my life revolved around an urban area of a few New York City neighborhood blocks, virtually all Jewish, but my reach started to expand.

For the first time I traveled downtown by subway with my friend Sid & no grown-up. we went to museum of Natural History. There was nothing good there so we went home at 4:30. I got home at 8:00 and I saw Jane Russel Frank Sinatra, Groucho Marx in Double Dynamite.

And back at school, "All I thought about was Fran. After school I spent all the time setting up my Betta tank for breeding zebra fish.

"Everybody’s signing autograph books. I signed Fran’s 5 times. I think she likes me. I hope so anyway. I’m preparing a tank for breeding zebra fish. I bought a pregnant Blue Platy.

I spent all afternoon working on my zebra tank. I let them get together through the glass partician. I hope she has eggs.

The pace is picking up on both guppies and girls, and I move up a notch of complexity with each. I shift from breeding livebearers to egg-layers and my thoughts of girls graduate from sentences to paragraphs.

My zebra didn’t have eggs. I bought shoes for me by myself for the first time. Tonight was the party. All the boys wore suits but me and 3 other boys. We wore sport jackets. The girls looked beautiful. The party wasn’t to good. I walked DeeDee and Dotty home. I only kissed Dotty goodnight.

Fortunately, my luck with girls was slightly better than my success with breeding zebra fish. I went to see ‘Mamba’s Daughters,’ with Dad at the High School. I enjoyed it very much, because it had wonderful acting. It had a lot to do with sex, and I understood it thoroughly.

The diary entries stop, then pick up a year later, but for only a few days:

When I arrived at the party most of the boys were there but none of the girls were. When they came I wanted to be with Dorothy but Jackie and Stevie stayed with her. So I went with Fran (second choice). I had a wonderful time with her all evening, and I didn’t curse or get dirty all night. Later on when everyone was tired the lights were turned down and we went into another room and danced by ourselves. By this time it couldn’t be called dancing but who cared. There were know games and all we did was dance and talk. By this time I was ready to fall asleep so I layed down with my head on Fran’s shoulder. Getting cold, like a gentleman I offered her my jacket, which she took gratefully. By 12:00 she was tired and wanted to go home. Thanking Allen and his mother for the most wonderful party we left (the two of us). When we reached her house, I took her key & opened the door for her & then kissed her goodnight twice. I am glad to say it did not go to my head.

Two days later, "I haven’t had any sex urges or have been sexy for a long time now, much to my delight . . . . We are know longer on non-talking terms with the girls and are very friendly with them.

"It poured all of today and