Back when milk was delivered to doorsteps in glass containers, pints and quarts were common vocabulary around the house. My buddies thought I was about half of a pint tall, so that became my nick name – Half Pint.
I didn’t mind them calling me that name. We all played together, lived on the same block, and had moms that called us when they wanted us to come home. My friends had nick names too, and all of our names together made us a kind of a club. There was a kid we called French Fry in the Club. He always had some food in his mouth, or gum, or someone else’s food, and was the first in the cafeteria line at lunch. We didn’t bother him about that because we each had our own quirks too. French Fry’s father worked at the gas station, and he helped his dad pump gas, but he spent most of the time by a vending machine. That’s where I always found him when we pulled in to get gas.
It's odd but our club didn’t have a club name. It’s hard to come up with a name for a club when you don’t have anything special about it other than having nicknames. We just called it The Club, and we stuck together like glue.
At home, because I was Half Pint, we had a foot stool in every room because everyone got tired of me asking them to get stuff down from places that were too high for me to reach. My father used to say that being short was an advantage because I was the last one to get hit when it rained. People laughed every time he said that, even if it was the hundredth time, but I got tired of the same joke.
I knew my role though, and my role was to be small. That was my job and it was what I did the best. As long as I didn’t try to be bigger, I was fine. I was to be small and do the things only small kids could do like be the last one to get hit when it rained.
I could also roll myself up like a tiny ball and crawl under the sink to hide between the waste can and the dirty pipes. In that compartment I sat on things that had missed the wastebasket, like parts of food and smelly, wadded up napkins and that had been back there a while. Sometimes, back there, I began to feel taller and bigger and older and ready to be bigger if I got a chance. Back there, I was just a half size small, half a person playing hide and seek from those looking for me. The longer it took someone to find me, the more I believed I was just half of a whole, not worth finding but a perfect fit in that little space between the pipes and the trash.
Mind you, the nick names in our special club came easy. We didn’t write essays or poems about them in school or tell our parents about them at the dinner table. We never thought about the names we gave each other or had a club meeting to vote on what they should be. They just evolved slowly, like a pie in the oven does. If you were lucky enough to get a nick name and be in the club, you knew you had friends you could count on, who’d also been back with the trash and felt about as little as I did sometimes. These were not kids who were going to make fun of you when the tide turned in a ball game. They wouldn’t try to steal your pocketknife when you played Mumbley Peg. My club friends, my half friends with names that were less-than, wouldn’t do that.
Not too long ago, a new kid joined our class. She was littler than me, and sat down at the Lego table, and told me how her father had taken her to breakfast that morning at the IHOP on National Pancake Day. She said on that day, everyone got a free short stack of pancakes.
“What’s a short stack?” I asked her as we sat down building Legos before the first bell.
“It’s like a stack of really small pancakes,” she said.
I had never heard of that, so I asked, “Is there anything wrong with the pancakes?”
“What do you mean, ‘wrong’?” She asked.
“Like…are they burnt or too done?” I inquired.
A few of her yellow Legos wouldn’t snap together and she had a sour look on her face.
“No, they are just small pancakes,” she said plainly.
“I’m in a club,” I said, “We all have nicknames we call each other.”
“What is your name?” She asked.
“Half-Pint,” I said, “Because I’m small. What yours?”
“Jordan, but my friends just call me Jordy. I guess we kind of have a club too,” she said. “You could be in our club with my friends if you wanted.”
“Do I need new nickname?” I asked.
“No, not really, just your own name,” she answered with a smile that came across the table.
She handed me the Legos and asked, “Can you get these to work?”
“Sure,” I said, and with a slight turn, the pieces snapped together.
“Oooo!! You’re good!” Jordy said, “I think I’ll call you Mr. Lego.”
The first bell rang. We jumped up to take our seats while the teacher took attendance. I had a new nickname and a new club, and I had made a new friend on National Pancake Day, where everyone, big or small, got a free short stack.