Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Baring My Sole


Will someone explain the obsession with feet?

I’m not talking about those foot-fetish people who skulk around smelling strangers’ shoes at the bowling alley.

Now it’s considered no big deal to drop $40 for a session with a stranger who will bathe and massage your feet while you sit enthroned on a tall chair equipped with its own whirlpool. They then take out a battery of instruments to pick and saw away until an hour later when you crab-walk out with fuchsia toes and the feet of a newborn.

 I miss the days when my mother would slap some Heartthrob Red onto her toes and be done with it. And that was only in the summer. In the winter, who cared? No one outside of family would see your feet anyway.

I wonder if what we have here is some new version of status. You know, like when Chinese aristocrats would grow their fingernails so long they were unable to perform the simplest functions for themselves, thus proving that they were rich enough to afford servants.

Years ago, a smooth handshake was evidence that you had never stooped to anything as sordid as manual labor. Now women aim for feet so soft we might as well have lackeys carting us around on their shoulders to save us from the ignominy of a callus or two.

As I set to it with my pumice stone and mini cheese grater, I grow nostalgic for the days of my youth when one of my greatest points of pride were the calluses that made it possible to cross my Oklahoma grandparents’ tar road barefoot at high noon in July. 

10 comments:

  1. Even now I smell hot tar and inhale and remember the day. Did you get in trouble, too, for bringing those tarry toes indoors?

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    1. I was tough, but not tough enough to walk on liquid tar. This was just solid, but Oklahoma-hot.

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  2. Pedicures are 23 bucks in the Sticks. I've only had one this summer. I'm over them.

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  3. I would never bare my toes for a stranger! I still have plenty of callouses - I haven't walked across tar in some time though. (Visiting from Patti's blog.) I'm also a retired teacher.

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    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    2. Whoops. A little error there. Typing faster than my tiny brain can go!

      Welcome, Barb. And take comfort in the fact that your feet can't possibly be any scarier than mine!

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  4. This is so funny,but so true! I've give up on pumice stones. Maybe a mini cheese grater would work for me. :)

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  5. I pay $20 and it lasts three weeks. I do love the colors, the cool big- toe designs and the look in summer sandals. It makes the world interesting that we're all different.

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  6. I think right before I pass into the next realm I will have a pedicure while eating a pound of bacon. What a way to go out. Till then, sadly I have better uses for $40.

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