Clever Magazine, "Fall '05, Old Lady Feet " (www.clevermag.com)

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Old Lady Feet

By Joyce Faulkner

Editor's note: After I whined about not receiving enough funny stuff any more, Joyce came to the rescue with an offer. She has promised to write up something funny for us every month! Here's her first piece. It made me smile because I had a grandma just like this one...

My grandma had ugly feet. Swollen, red bunions pressed her big toes sideways. Hard little kernels knotted her smaller digits and the ones in the middle bubbled up into what she called ‘hammertoes’. By her mid-fifties, she hobbled. In her seventies, she couldn’t bear anything but soft felt scuffs.

Podiatrists say that ill-fitting, poorly designed shoes cause ‘old lady feet’. That makes sense. My grandmother was a waitress back in the twenties and thirties. I have a picture of her. Adventurous and pretty –- she wears a drop-waist dress, rolled garters and high-heeled Mary Janes with pointy toes – very pointy toes. Style was every thing even then, I guess.

I’m not so very different from the ladies of the 1920s. Boxes of stylish old shoes fill my closet. I bought the sexy black sandals with three inch heels for a formal dinner. Every time I wear them I twist an ankle. The hot platform shoes with square toes were for a party back when glittering glass globes dangled from the ceiling. I haven’t worn them since.

I have tap shoes but the toe boxes are too tight so I seldom tap. My patent leather pumps make my feet sweat and my sandals make them swell. I have alligator boots for line-dancing and horseback riding except I never line-dance and I wear Nikes when I go horseback riding. I have high-tops for hiking, rubber flippers for swimming and gillies for Scottish Country Dancing. The high-tops rub blisters around my ankles. The flippers make my feet smell and the gillies hurt my heels.

Although many women worry about size, I find this obsession amusing. Perhaps that’s because I have short fat tootsies. Searching for size 6 doublewide in an Easy Spirit store, I often strike up conversations with taller shoppers. Inevitably, after slipping on a pair of slick-soled pumps and walking stiff-legged to the mirror, an elegant matron will ask, “Do you think they make my feet look big?”

I always say no.

It’s a trick question anyway. Men never understand that.

That said, I don’t notice women wearing shoes that are too tight anymore. I used to work with a lady who bought rubber-soled ballet slippers so small that her instep bulged and her toes appeared to curl. I’d find her in the back aisle, taking inventory in her stockings, her tiny size sevens stuck into the pockets of her smock. “Feet hurt, Marguerite?”

“Oh, no. Just trying to get cool.” She’d blush and turn away. Who was she kidding? The woman was five foot ten if she was an inch.

Now that I’m older, I want to know which shoes will turn my lower extremities into mush when I hit some magical age like say fifty-three. The four hundred dollar lizard jobbies hurt as much as the $4.98 fakes and the ones that feel good make me look like Olive Oyl. So what’s a woman to do? Ugly shoes or ugly feet? Hmmm. Maybe the Olive Oyl look isn’t so bad.

Wanna read something else by Joyce Faulkner?

Here's the link to her website. Take a look at it when you have a few minutes.

Her latest book is In the Shadow of Suribachi (Red Engine Press, 2005)

She is also the author of Losing Patience (Red Engine Press, 2004) and is the
co-author of The Complete Writer (Red Engine Press, 2005)