At a recent Patriots tailgate, my friend Shep described me as being built like a mailbox.
“You know,” he said. “Like one of those big, blue post office boxes. A big rectangle.”
I knew what he meant.
Last week, a student told me I look like I’m built from rectangles and squares.
We were talking about geometry.
Another jumped in and added, “Yeah, you look like one of those cardboard box robots!”
Kids are terrible.
However, they aren’t entirely wrong. One of my less pleasing attributes is the absence of a neck. My head literally sits atop my shoulders.
A friend once described me as a “neckless stump with legs for arms.”
Another friend likes to say I have “arms like legs and legs like people.”
I once had a conversation with a coworker that went like this:
Me: Elysha and I feared our kids would have huge heads and no necks like their dad. Poor little things.
Coworker: Don’t be silly. You have a neck.
Me: I really don’t. Just this big head stuck on a pair of shoulders.
Coworker: Don’t be ridiculous. Show me your neck.
Me: Huh?
Coworker: C’mon. Show me your neck.
Me: I am showing you my neck. What do you think I am? A turtle?
Coworker: No, I mean stretch your neck out.
Me: I am stretching my neck out. This is it. It’s all the neck I’ve got!
Coworker: Oh.
While it hasn’t bothered me much, Shep once sent me this from the Word of the Day website to mitigate my consternation:
WORD
argal
MEANING:
conjunction, adverb: Therefore.
USAGE:
“Mr. Barbecue-Smith was a man with a very large head and no neck. In his earlier middle age, he had been distressed by this absence of neck but was comforted by reading in Balzac’s ‘Louis Lambert’ that all the world’s great men have been marked by the same peculiarity and for a simple and obvious reason: Greatness is nothing more nor less than the harmonious functioning of the faculties of the head and heart; the shorter the neck, the more closely these two organs approach one another; argal…It was convincing.”
— Aldous Huxley, 1921
It didn’t make me feel any better.
