Four Footprints In The Sand

When I was a kid, I was self-conscious about my feet.  Everybody else had normal feet, but I had feet with high arches. 

My unusual feet were evident whenever our family went to the beach and I walked on the sand at low tide. Everybody else who walked on the sand had two footprints.  I had four footprints --- each time I took a step, the front of my foot did not connect to the back of my foot.

My feet not only have high arches, they are wide.  

So wide that whenever my mother took me on shoe-shopping excursions, she would have big consultations with the shoe salesman.  However, I did not mind these shoe store excursions because I got to stand on a wooden box filled with radioactive material and watch my toe bones wiggle. 

These boxes were called Foot-O-Meters, and were supposed to show if shoes fit properly.  They had periscope tubes for Mom and the shoe salesman to peer into and see the bones in my feet glowing green from the radium below them. 

Back in those days, radioactivity was nothing to worry about.

When I was old enough to buy shoes on my own, I did not have big consultations with the shoe salesmen.  The widest any shoe came in was an E width.  E width was not wide enough for me, so I simply bought shoes that were too sizes too long so that my wide feet could fit in them.

This meant I walked around in shoes with a couple of inches of empty space in the front.  I walked around expecting that someone would ask me why the front of my shoes never looked worn down. 

Then the running shoe burst upon the scene, and athletic shoe stores started popping up all over.  

I went into one of these stores.  The salesman saw how wide my feet were, and brought me a pair of shoes with a width greater than E.  The shoes were E-E-E-E-E-E.   They were white athletic shoes made by New Balance, the company which had broken the width barrier.

At age 40, I finally could buy shoes that fit me perfectly.  And I could wear my white athletic shoes without being self-conscious about wasting space in the front of the shoes.  Life was good.

Well, life was good until I turned 70 years old. 

I was watching a basketball game on TV, and noticed that none of the players were wearing white athletic shoes; they were wearing colorful athletic shoes.  

Then I went to a barbell class at Gold’s Gym, and looked around at people’s feet.  No one else in class was wearing white shoes – their shoes were so colorful that they sometimes matched the color of their shorts or t-shirts.

I can’t go colorful, because New Balance shoes with width E-E-E-E-E-E only come in white.  Now I feel self-conscious about my feet again, just like I did when I was a kid walking on the sand at low tide. 

- . - .- . - . - . 

The US Surgeon General in 1927 produced a hygiene movie showing you how to buy good-fitting shoes, with the help of a Foot-O-Meter (1 minute):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7oqMw6ipo



A pair of colorful shoes take a tour of Miami (1 minute):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOEcgadlRf8

- . - .- . - . - . 

NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  Send an email to ParadiseDouglas at gmail.com to find out how to purchase a copy by mail.