Summer

“How tall are you?” comes a question I get all the time, but one I ignore in this moment. Instead, I turn and ask my own question.

“How many days left?” I say, standing in front of Cambridge Rindge and Latin, a high school only a few blocks from Harvard Square and one right next to the library I’m visiting today.

“How tall are you?” the liveliest one asks again, he one of five students sitting on a wall in the shade of the day before the solstice. Again, I ignore the question, and repeat my own.

“How many days until summer break?”

“Two,” a couple of them answer at the same time, part of a chorus of conversation one might expect after a long day of classes, but only a heartbeat away from freedom.

“Today and tomorrow,” I say, to which they all respond in concert.

“Yes!”

Not to be denied, the energetic one asks again, “how tall are you?”

He is not going to stop until he gets an answer, so I ask them all, “OK, I have a question for you, and the one who gets it right gets a prize.”

“Six feet,” my young friend shouts. “Six one!”

One of the girls interrupts and says, “wait, he hasn’t asked the question yet.” She and her friend are seated, more patient. The boys now standing, crowding me with their answers.

“The question is how tall am I in feet and inches if I’m two meters tall?”

“Are you a teacher?” my new best friend asks.

“That’s funny,” I offer, though nobody’s laughing. Instead, they all start blurting out random answers to the question, none of them correct.

How tall are you? the question I get most often in the world, whose answer I like to offer in this way, to either spark a conversation or simply nudge us on to something else. Very few Americans answer correctly, though every once in a while I’ll get someone who actually knows what a meter measures.

“Nope, nope, and nope,” I repeat to their spirited guesses.

“Wait,” the two girls say, reaching for her phone and now speaking into it. “Two meters in feet,” she poses.

“Six feet six and a half inches,” speaks the phone.

“I said that,” the boys shout, miffed.

“Six foot six and change,” I say. “A meter is three feet three and a third inches, so no one wins.”

“What was the prize?” the boy asks.

I pull my hands out of my pockets, nothing in them, opening each with a flourish.

“Summer!”