Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 10, 1991 TAG: 9104100291
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JANE SEE WHITE/ STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
Waiting for him, lounging against a newspaper box near the intersection of College and Main and trying to read a book - well, it's only natural to be distracted by feet.
When you're expecting a set of very large feet to approach you, everyone's feet begin to look big: The Reeboks, Topsiders and Wingtips filing past seem boat-sized.
Until Cantwell's too-small size 17 Nikes hove into sight.
These are big feet. More than a foot long (no pun intended) when they're not shod. With those high-topped, heavy-duty Nikes on, they're close to 15 inches long.
And Cantwell, a 20-year-old, 6-foot, 4-inch tall Virginia Tech student from Centreville, has been told he might even grow some more. His size 18, super-narrow feet might actually get bigger.
Cantwell hopes not, though he doesn't suppose it would make much difference.
Most of us get to decide how we want to be special. Maybe we work hard to be regarded as brainy, or funny. But others, like PaulCantwell, aren't so lucky: Nature decides how they stand out.
And with Cantwell, it's his feet.
"People come up to me at McDonald's and say, `Man, what size are those feet?' " he says. "Sometimes I'll meet new people and they'll be treating me just like a regular person, and then suddenly they'll look down, and go, `Oh, my God, look at your feet!' "
As a kid, Cantwell wore adult shoe sizes that matched his age until his feet stopped (knock wood) growing when he was 18. At 9, he wore size 9. At 13, he wore size 13. At 16, he wore size 16.
"I wore adult shoes in elementary school. It was not cool," Cantwell says. "In the pictures, I look like a little golfer or a salesman."
Name the big-feet joke, Cantwell's heard it.
Schoolmates nicknamed him "Gunboats." In elementary school, a kid built an aircraft-carrier deck on a confiscated Cantwell shoe. Kids would steal his shoes and put them in water to see if they'd float.
On his first day working as a lifeguard in high school, Cantwell put sunblock all over his body - except for his feet, and he suffered second-degree burns on them. "My friends said, `Don't they usually put people's names in the newspaper when they're burned over 90 percent of their body?' "
When Cantwell asks department-store shoe clerks if they carry size 18, they've been known to suggest that he go to the sporting goods department and try on a canoe. Seeking insoles or arch-support inserts (poor soul: He has flat feet, too.), he's been told, "Well, we could put two size 9s together for you."
Once Cantwell and his dad were moving a washing machine that slipped out of his father's grasp and landed - hard - on Cantwell's foot. "At the emergency room, what did they do? They laughed at my feet."
It's not just the jokes that get old. Unless you can afford custom-made shoes - and Cantwell cannot - you can't get size 18 footwear in many styles. This limits Cantwell's recreational pursuits. So does the fact that, as Cantell puts it, "I'm still going through my clumsy stage."
We all have fantasy dreams: As they sleep, short people may dream they are tall; we get to fly or breathe underwater. "I have dreams where I can run," Cantwell says.
Once, in high school, he tried to run hurdles. "I knocked every single one of them down. You're supposed to twist your feet sideways going over, but I couldn't twist mine far enough."
He doesn't ski and no longer ice skates. "Getting special clips and boots for skiing is too expensive. And my fiance always wants to go ice skating, but I quit when I was 13 because they usually don't have rental skates bigger than size 13. I tell her, `What do you want me to do, attach sleds to my feet?' "
As for baseball and soccer: "Who can afford custom-made cleats?"
There are a lot of things Cantwell can't do because his feet trip him up. Literally.
He can't, for instance, stride boldly down a staircase. "My feet are a lot longer than the treads are wide, so I have to go down sideways. But I still misjudge and fall down the stairs a lot."
As for dancing, "I haven't tried the dancing thing. My feet get stepped on so much as it is, and I step on a lot of feet. It's unavoidable. Rock concerts are a nightmare - any place that's crowded is."
Bicycling's not much fun, either. Even when he raises the seat to the maximum height, he usually can't extend his legs fully when pedaling. "And my toes tend to scrape the pavement. That can hurt."
If running is a fantasy, so is comfort. Cantwell sometimes finds his shoe size in big-and-tall men's stores, but just as often he has to buy a smaller size. And he can rarely find his width: quadruple A. Most size 17 or 18 shoes come in B width, he says.
He can't find socks that fit, either. Usually he buys the largest size available (which means the heel is somewhere around where his arch would be, if he had one) and pulls hard, often, to keep them up. The toes go first.
And cost? Forget it. He generally has to spend between $90 and $200 for off-the-shelf footwear.
"Boots are out of the question. They'd have to be custom-made. But a couple of years ago I found some size 16 boots at an outdoors store - they had GoreTex linings and everything. It was, like, wow."
Slippers? Galoshes? No way. They'd have to be custom-made.
Having big feet can be a lonely sort of problem.
Other people, Cantwell notes, complain about being cramped on airplanes - but the space usually accommodates carry-on luggage (under the seat in front of the them) and feet (in the space between seats). Cantwell needs all that space just for his feet. Other people can stand near the top of a ladder, but Cantwell's toes rub up against the wall, preventing him from getting the balls of his feet onto the tread.
"Once I met a guy with size 20 feet. It was really great. We sat and talked for about three hours about our foot histories," Cantwell says.
Cantwell doesn't know who to hold responsible for his feet. His dad wears relatively petite size 12s. Both his brothers have average feet. His mom's feet look proportional to him.
"But hey, people are getting bigger. I'll bet my kids wear size 24!"
by CNB