Two Good Feet

If I sit still for long, my feet turn into Klondike bars or frozen turkey patties.  One or the other, maybe a combination of a few frozen-food-section items.  Cold.  They're pretty unusable today; it has been cold and the wind chill has factored the air to colder yet.  Winter is making itself known every day, and my feet are telling me so.  

The Klondike-bar effect doesn't happen when I sit still in hot weather, of course.  No, in hot weather my feet turn into something that looks like a pillow with five little toe buds apiece.   Poor feet, they go from one resented condition to another, just down there trying to do their job, hoping not to be run into door frames, curbs, or into the back of my other leg.  Grace is an intermittently enjoyed attribute in my life.

I remember a biographical show about Ginger Rogers [edited from Grace Kelly] on PBS where she described dancing with Fred Astaire.  They were the quintessential ballroom dancers in the movies.  She always appeared to be floating on a cloud as she danced, smiling like an angel and she never showed strain or fatigue.  It is said that her feet were bleeding from all the torment her shoes gave her as she danced.  I, in comparison, have poor tolerance for any kind of squeeze or pinch from my shoes and become resentful of whoever dreamed up the idea of high heels if they hurt.

In spite of the fact that my feet puff when hot and become graceless blocks when cold, I like my feet a lot.  They're good flippers in the water and have not been prone to disease or disfigurement (mostly due to my very few hours wearing high heels).  But, more than that, my feet are impressively mobile and strong, accommodating slants, angles and rough surfaces that I hardly notice.  Plus, there are ten nails that are fun to polish.

Zillions of people have shoe fetishes, or at least love shoes to distraction.  I don't often notice shoes, and I'm always surprised when people have noticed mine.  I guess I know my feet are without complaint, so I leave them alone. I know there are the select few who feel some sort of urge to walk across beds of hot coals to see if they can keep from feeling them.  Mind over matter, they say.

I don't want to subject my feet to that kind of test.  They're doing fine so far.  If they get cold in this gray weather, it's on me to keep them warm; it's not their fault.  I look for comfortable shoes, avoid stepping on bees and nails, and leave footprints in the sand when the weather is warm enough.

I wrote recently about swimming and trying an open-water swim this year.  A reader replied with an article about a man who lost both arms and legs after being struck by lightning.  He swam the English Channel with prostheses that work like flippers, and made across in a time 10 hours faster than he'd planned.  No legs, no arms, definitely no feet.  I have no idea how he managed, but it proves that will and courage count for almost everything.  Amazing.

Next time I complain about my feet - or legs or arms - I'll think of him and rethink my whining.  As for  now,  I just put up my feet on a pillow and they're doing much better.  Hmmm, might be time for a foot massage, though.

Regarding My Left Foot

Back on the couch with my laptop at the end of a longish, but pleasant, day, I see my left foot over there at a distance and notice that I can't really feel it unless I wiggle it.  So, over yonder is a body part of mine that is apparently awaiting some news from the home front - my brain - to set it into motion.

Feet are odd, you know?  We only notice them when they are tripped, stubbed, tickled or burned.  Poked and stepped on.

Our shoes don't fit and we blame our feet sometimes.  You get a blister and then you know you have a foot.  It speaks to you loudly, clearly and relentlessly.  They bark at you and nag.

Speaking of nags, it reminds me of horses.  Friends of mine, when I was growing up, had horses.  And that makes me think of their feet. The horses, as horses are, were large and heavy and had metal shoes.  Horses get twitchy now and then and take it upon themselves to let loose and kick the bejabbers out of whomever is nearby.  My friends came to school with U-shaped bruises on their legs and feet.  Surprisingly - to me, a no-horse person - they kept their horses even so.  My guess is that if I were to get myself into a cantankerous mood and kick a few plaster hunks out of my wall or launch a friend into the next stall because I couldn't tolerate my clothing any longer, my friend would drop me like a hot rock as a friend.  Likely, I would be arrested.  Horses, in comparison, are soothed, brushed, helped to overcome their twitchiness.  We believe horses to be less intelligent, so we put hard metal shoes on their feet, straps on their heads and feed them hay.  We believe ourselves to be very intelligent, so we sit up high on top of horses, steer them around, but when they get cranky, they fling us into a nearby bush and clomp back to the barn.

Now, at the end of my day, I have a foot over there resting on the arm of my couch as I type here on my keyboard; it's awaiting my signal to perform.  Kick, spring, balance me, trot, run, something. I wiggle it now and again, but I'm so used to it that a wiggle seems very insignificant.  My foot is bored, remote, indifferent, even perhaps cooly resentful of me. 

Since my horse-owner friends in school often showed up with bruises on their feet and legs, I regarded their mounts as dangerous; my approach with horses was to steer a wide berth around them, far out of range of their hind legs especially.  A horse, if you've ever been near one, can be standing still, looking dull-eyed and sleepy.  Droopy.  About to fall over.  Then, they make a long, deep, throat-clearing sound, and basically you don't know what the heck their intention is.  I believe it means, "Watch out, I'm going to kick the apple out of that tree 20 feet away with my iron-clad feet."  You know a horse's hoof is actually a toe, right?  So, they are like ballerinas en pointe, always dashing around on the tips of their toes. Have you ever seen a ballerina's foot?  They're a mess, all over bruises, sores, reddened and abused.  So, if a horse suddenly slams a stool into the next corral, he's dealing with a tippy-toe existence and blowing off some steam.  

I want my foot to do something unusual, now that I'm noticing it.  It seems so far away, over there, beyond my usual reach, especially at the moment when I feel a little stiff and slow.  At an earlier point in the day, say after one or two cups of coffee, I might get an urge to reach down and touch my foot.  You know, bend way over and connect with it in a friendly way.  I'll bet your feet carry on a lonesome existence off in their homeland, south of your knees. If you're like me, you take them for granted, you barely appreciate them, certainly you don't love them and caress them kindly.  I'm done writing now, but I intend to do something nice to that foot and its brother.  I salute my feet! Thanks to them, I can now walk instead of crawl to my bed and go to sleep.