After a week of casual dress, I went to my closet this crisp Monday morning to put on a pair of my usual slacks. They felt entirely too loose, so I went to put on my belt. The belt went all the way to the last hole. I felt triumphant that my spare-tire from the last ten years was finally gone.

But what happened after that is making me wonder if I wasn’t abducted by Aliens who singled me out to perform a useless medical experiment with no value except to make me question my own sanity.

The loose belt was one thing. But as I continued to get dressed, I realized that my slacks were about three inches too short. “Okay, weird.” I thought.

I put on a second pair, similar, a similar style, and they were too short. “That’s just freaking bizarre!” These are from the same set of slacks I purchased three years ago.

“Third time’s the charm,” only, in this case, it wasn’t. “Dammit!”

Five pairs of slacks later, going through all the usual suspects, I finally found a pair that fit — a pair that were at the top of the closet waiting to be altered for my short legs.

Now, I’ve been five-foot-eight for twenty years. I had completely resigned myself to the fact that I would forever be one of those feisty, vertically challenged men who people quietly snicker, making comments like, “Short man’s complex,” whenever the Starbuck’s cashier just won’t get it right.

I pulled out the tape measure and a book — held it vertically so there’s no mistaking it — and what did I find? That I’m suddenly 5’11! Sure enough, I can reach the coffee filters on the top shelf in the kitchen without the step stool!

I Googled and Googled, and came up short (no pun intended). I couldn’t find anything on mid-life growth spurts. Pretty much everyone stops getting taller by the age of twenty-seven, most many years before that.

In the immortal words of Sherlock Holmes, by way of Sir. Arthur Conan Doyle,

“That process,” said I, “starts upon the supposition that when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

In finding no evidence of the scientific possibility that I could have grown three inches over night, my improbable conclusion must be true.
 

I figure it must have happened some time after the local news, and just before the Infomercials started. I was falling asleep on the couch, watching the news, and faded during the last fifteen minutes. I awoke with a fright, checked all the doors, looked out the windows, and went upstairs to bed.

Some time in that foggy fifteen minutes, the Aliens must have shown up, transferred my consciousness into a body of their own making, and left me in exactly the same spot on the couch where I would awaken to another annoying infomercial.

So maybe I’m off-my-rocker. Aliens are the only way that I can explain three inches of growth, all in the legs, when I’m pushing forty.

Damn Aliens. If they were gonna give me a new body, they should have given me some replacement hair to go with it. Or, perhaps they put me back just at the right moment, when the informercial that I so hastily switched off would have shown me a revolutionary hair-regrowth technology.

If they’ve been studying us for five thousand years, surely they know that nobody likes infomercials.