Too Small

I've always had a fondness for small things, especially when people say that they are too small. My laptop (currently convalescing--get well soon, Jossie!) is a Netbook, allegedly too small and weak to do most of what's demanded of a computer in this day and age. Every year I go on a mission trip to build houses, and every year in pride of place in my toolbox is a six-ounce framing hammer that has gotten me some strange looks from those wielding huge hammers meant for the kind of work we're doing.

All my life, I've had the sense that I wasn't good enough. I hear rumors that that is a common thing for people who are different, especially those with disabilities. Our needs and wishes are treated as somehow less important--to be attended to only if it doesn't inconvenience anyone--with the attitude that we are only a little bit removed from the practices of ancient Sparta and Rome. "Be grateful that we let you breathe OUR air," is the attitude I've sensed too often, as if air and light and love were things you had to earn by conforming closely enough to everyone else's ideals of who you should be.

I was always different, starting in preschool. The playground games my first year of preschool were always the ones that you won by being the biggest, the strongest, the fastest, the one with the best stamina--and I was the smallest, weakest, slowest, and shortest-winded, without even factoring in my bent for the cerebral and the fact that I was the only girl, simply because I was half the age of any of my classmates.

In some ways, I still see myself that way--as that lone toddler just shy of three, surrounded by boys preparing to go off to kindergarten--and so in a way I empathize with small things. Wilbur at the start of Charlotte's Web, or the Netbook in a family of full-size laptops and big desktops, or a framing hammer when everyone else is carrying power tools: these are my favorites, the ones I identify with and root for.

And my little hammer and I, we showed them. We showed them carriage bolts.