Lord of the Digits

The world has to stop spinning when you get a pedicure. You're kind-of trapped there, with the warm water swirling around your feet. If you're lucky, and the massage chair isn't murdering your back with strange mechanical demons, you get all cozy and relaxed. I really have no business exposing my bare feet to anyone, particularly strangers, but I still do it. I only wear shoes to placate the conventional world. I even have sets of barefoot sandals (they don't have soles), where I try to deceive people into thinking I have shoes on, when I really don't. It would help, if my feet were at least passable in appearance. They are not. They yearn to break free and they mostly hurt, so I indulge them. They're actually too knobby and gnarly for anything but sandals and the warm earth beneath, but apparently this condition is rare. When I saw Lord of the Rings on the big screen for the first time, I was so happy to see that there were other people with feet like mine. But then the movie was over and I remembered that Hobbits aren't real. Very strange tootsie-roll DNA runs strong through the Slate family toes. The gene is very persistent, and you can see it running through the generations. I do believe my brother-in-law hesitated to marry my sister after he saw her feet. He's so very proud of his, and the thought of exposing his progeny to those future genetic combinations might have given him pause. But alas, her other charms, which are myriad, overwhelmed him and now they have eleven children with (mostly) Hobbit feet. My brother's six children are running along similar paths. Grandpa Jerry is with Jesus now, but there's no denying he was here. We see his DNA busting out everywhere. 

This week, as an impossibly tiny woman worked her magic on my digits, I wondered what she thought about women like me, with large, firm foundations, while trying to tidy up those mangy hooves? Hooves got me to thinking about God, how He made almost every creature (that walks on legs) with tools. Our appendages all end in some form of keratin, which we spend insane amounts of money buffing and painting into mostly unnatural shapes. He put these cool, natural utensils on the ends of most mammals' extremities. We humans stuff ours into shoes and forget how to use them. They can be pretty handy while climbing trees and such.

I tried to squeeze into some actual shoes today, after half a year of making like a hippie in bare feet and sandals. It's starting to get nippy in the mornings, so I guess I need to start training these puppies to tolerate a little restraint. I suffered with the constrictions of a million little leather cells trying to force my happy bones into strange places. I don't think that Hobbits ever had to submit to such injustices. I have a feeling it's going to be a long winter...