peevish mama

Doctor Dash is going to get all persnickity and flustered when he reads this.  It’ll ruffle his feathers and get his undies in a bunch.  It’s one of the things that I say that annoys him.  If ever we are watching TV with our legs stretched on the coffee table in front of us and I sigh and wiggle my freshly painted toes and start in with “I really do have nice feet . . .” he’ll roll his eyes and do his best to disavow me of my illusions by making snarky comments intended to erode my foot-confidence.  It’s like he’s trying to protect me from myself, to shelter me from the inevitable disappointment I will suffer when I enter the Ms. Minnesota Foot Pageant and don’t take home the crown, or toe ring or whatever the prize is.  He doesn’t want me to find an agent, or get my feet insured.  He says my feet aren’t all that. 

Well, he needn’t bother with the squelching, because I know I have nice feet.  They are big.  But they are pretty.  And as far as I’m concerned, their only flaw is that they’re flat, which explains why they are so big.  If I had a decent arch, I would be a size 9 instead of a size 10. Furthermore, my large dogs are very good for swimming and keeping me firmly planted on the earth on extremely windy days.  

My feet: big, pretty and useful, like a corn-fed farm girl from America’s heartland.  

And I don’t even get pedicures!!! My feet are natural beauties.  Imagine what we could accomplish if I let a professional buff and massage and primp and polish!  I think there could be serious income involved.  But I live with a man who is not supportive of my dreams (and also, I’m kinda cheap and would rather spend seventy bucks on a cute t-shirt than a pedicure), and so my feet are stuck in the small times, cooling their heels in this two-bit-good-for-nothing-but-dashed-dreams-town.

A few years back I read a great article in the New Yorker about a guy who was hellbent on making shoes out of natural materials that simulated walking barefoot.  He used grass and mud and animal skins.  I love crazy fuckers that get obsessed with stuff like this.  Anyway, I devoured the article with relish, because in addition to having nice feet, I  like to walk around barefoot (unless I’m in a wet and potentially hairy environment like a locker room).  The author described three foot types, which, if I remember correctly were as follows:  The Greek Foot is the kind where the second toe is longer than the big toe.  We all know people with this affliction, in fact, it even runs in my family.  My mother and, I believe, all of my siblings have the snaggle toe and it ain’t pretty.  My feet are nothing short of miraculous having emerged from that genetic stew of pedal malformations.  The second type is the Egyptian Foot where the first toe is long and the others taper down in an aesthetically pleasing way.  This would be me.  The third type of foot is the Peasant Foot which is a thick, blocky foot where all the toes go straight across.  Like Fred Flintstone.  Or peasants.  Not as ugly as the Greek Foot, but nothing you need to be seeing in your glossy fashion magazine.

Doctor Dash has Peasant Feet.  French Canadian Peasant Feet, to be specific.  To add injury to the insult of his charmless squared off toes, he has a propensity for maiming them by wearing ill fitting shoes for stop and start sports.  He’s on his third round of losing his big toenails, which is always a long, dramatic ordeal punctuated with lots of moaning and discussion, amateur self-performed podiatric care, and photographic documentation (seriously, we have lots of pictures of Dash’s nasty, oozing, about-to-fall-off toenails)

So, I think that what we have here is a simple case of jealousy.  My feet lead a charmed life.  It’s just so easy to be my feet and though my feet are humble, they do like to prance around naked, which can’t be easy for the broken and downtrodden French Canadian Peasants.  Maybe I need to be a little more magnanimous and cover up once in a while . . . wear some socks when we’re watching TV so the Peasants don’t get so ornery.  Charity begins at home, after all.

O.K., I know the toes pictured below look Egyptian, but it’s because Doctor Dash has shrewdly tilted his pinky toes away from the camera giving the illusion of his toes tapering down.  The shot of my foot at the top of the page is a candid from a few years ago . . . very au natural and unrehearsed.