Tyrades! by Danny Tyree

“There was shrinkage! Shrinkage!” – George Costanza

For years, my various physicians let me skate by.

I would dutifully (if trepidatiously) hop onto the scales for my weight assessment, but I was allowed to fudge on my Body Mass Index by self-identifying my height.

Not so this last visit. In an “Up against the wall!” moment reminiscent of a gambling den raid, I was confronted with the realization that I have shrunk two inches since my peak. (Who needs tongue depressors when the clinic has self-image depressors?)

Granted, I had already downgraded my self-identification several years ago when I was at the McWane Science Center in Birmingham, Alabama and a ceiling-mounted laser doohickey gave me the unsolicited information that I was one inch shorter than I thought. (“Second opinion: that comb-over ain’t foolin’ anybody! Better self-deprecation through science!”)

Loss of height is a normal part of the aging process (part of the anthropological shift from “hunter-gatherer’ to “hunter-gatherer of senior discounts”), and maybe I have actually lost a full two inches – or maybe my “official” measurement from high school was overly ambitious.

The faculty did run the measurements like a “Lucy and Ethel in the candy factory” assembly-line process, and they did dispense some other information that, in retrospect, is highly dubious. (“The dinosaurs would still be alive today if they had ducked under these wooden desks. No unidentifiable mammal-ish lifeforms were killed in the preparation of this meal. Once you earn your diploma, there will be a tug-of-war between companies desperately seeking laps runners and companies desperately seeking sentence diagrammers.”)

Perhaps this medical-chart update is not as jarring for me as for some of my classmates who always felt “10-feet tall and bulletproof.” I harbored more realistic expectations of being “5-foot-11 and, say, do you realize how many major arteries are severed by flicking paper footballs each year?”

Nothing dampens your virility like gradually going from “How’s the weather up there?” to “Stand on this milk crate and tell me if my underarm deodorant is still working.”

Not to be overly melodramatic, but this is the sort of milestone that forces you to look your own mortality in the face. Granted, you have to stand on tiptoes and crane your neck, but you look your own mortality in the face. (“Whoa! At this rate, I could use a shoebox for a casket!”)

On the other hand, in the grand scheme of things, this is nothing to get bent out of shape over. No, we have our old pal osteoporosis for that. (“Young lady, could you get the calcium tablets off the top shelf for me? I assume you’re a young lady. All I can see is the top of my shoes.”)

I turned to AI for solace. X’s Grok chatbot reassured me that my height is average (or just a skosh above average) for males my age. But maybe Grok is programmed to sugarcoat replies to users’ plaintive inquiries. (“You would be surprised by how many Nobel laureates abuse handicapped parking spaces. In excess of 110 percent of America’s governors have reported erotic dreams about Rosie the robot in the ‘Jetsons’ cartoons…”)

*Sigh* I could stand taller if only my old high school would send some encouraging words.

“School? Nah, your parents walked five miles to and from the MALT SHOP in waist-deep snow, uphill both ways.”

There was vindication! Vindication!

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Copyright 2026 Danny Tyree, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Danny Tyree welcomes email responses at [email protected] and visits to his Facebook fan page “Tyree’s Tyrades.”