Feet are possibly the most overlooked but important part of the human anatomy. Because we walk on them, play sports with them and sometimes gauge our health by them, we often are reminded to be kind to our feet when they complain to us.
After nearly four years of working from home, many people’s feet have become accustomed to not being in shoes, and this has come back to annoy us in the form of pain when we try to jam them into shoes.
Last summer I dealt with the consequences of too many days in slipper-shod feet when a favorite pair of sandals betrayed me on the first day of vacation. I was at the shore and needed to pick up the keys to my home for the week, but parking was already becoming difficult, and I had just found a sweet spot near the unit I was renting. No problem, I thought; I’ll walk to the realtor and get the keys.
I started walking the twelve blocks to the offices, when the soles of my feet began to burn. I pushed through it, got my keys and walked back, but in increasingly severe pain. By the time I got my things moved in and sat down, I removed the sandal on my right foot to find an oozing blister the size of my foot pad. The sandal’s insole was darkened from the leak that had drained onto it. Other than the footwear for the beach, I didn’t pack extra shoes. After a (painful) quick stop at the local pharmacy for blister bandages, I pushed through as the discomfort subsided. I even walked the boardwalk every day. Ultimately it took two months for the wound to heal.
As I tried to go through my supply of footwear, I was finding that every pair seemed to irritate some part of my foot. This would never do. So, off to the shoe store I went.
Because my feet have always been wide width, I never went to an ordinary shoe store, even as a child. If I managed to find something there, it was a treat, such as when I was able to (comfortably) wear a pair of Candies (a shoe that was a must-have in the late 1970s), or when the now-defunct Payless Shoe Source managed to stock one or two pairs I could be comfortable in.
My go-to shoe store is an old-fashioned (by today’s standards) place in which a sales associate measures your feet, has a stockroom of lengths and widths to fit a basketball player or a baby, and the shoes they stock are top quality and meant to last.
The sales associate measured my feet and broke the news to me: I’ve gained a size.
It’s a fact of life that as we age, we gain sizes. Some of us gain in our guts and butts, but most also gain in the tootsies. I went from an average size and non-average width to a larger in both. And I never could play basketball.
We tried on a pair of sneakers similar to what I wore in (and which I had bought there the prior autumn). He checked my customer history and adjusted the try-on pair up a width; they fit like a glove. A painless glove for my feet. I came home with them.
But what about everyday nice shoes that don’t look like they belong on a basketball court? I mentioned one of the popular manufacturer’s common styles, and he brought out a pair to try on. They, too, fit beautifully in the wider size, but color-wise were designed for a formal event. The style was so popular, they were not in stock, so we ordered a pair in basic everyday black.
So now I have the burden of going through my shoes and seeing if any can be salvaged; if not, the store has a charity bin which will ensure their use by somebody in need.
This is how things should be: when somebody buys and then donates to somebody who needs and has no funds to buy, good shoes live on comforting somebody else’s feet. Somebody with feet that have never been on a basketball court.
My shoe collection had been a sizeable one for when I worked in an office every day, so now I will whittle it down to just what I will need as I won’t be in a building ever again before retirement. So my army of shoes will be decimated, and their replacements will be bigger and wider.
Just like the person walking in them.
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