Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 18, 1994 TAG: 9407260042
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By HENRY ALLEN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Barefoot. The same if he lived nowadays: You can't imagine him in penny loafers or Florsheim wingtips. You wouldn't trust him - especially in the edgier moments, like when he put devils into 2,000 Gadarene swine, and they ``ran violently down a steep place'' and ``choked in the sea.'' Doing that in wingtips, he'd seem like a bad combination of Jerry Falwell and the Orkin man.
This doesn't tell you much about Jesus, but it says something about bare feet.
Like going braless, going shoeless for most mortals is soft-core nudism, both lurid and cosmic.
Didn't Frank Zappa write a song about feet? About how ``you need feet to keep your socks on, you need feet to join the Army''?
You also need feet to wear bare feet.
You wear bare feet the way men wear beards or women wear fingernails, the way Sly Stallone wears his bare chest, or Dolly Parton wears her bosom. Feet can be beautiful, given a high arch and long, leisurely toes; hollowed ankles (the foot equivalent of high cheekbones) and a visible fan of metatarsal bones suspending the foot like bridge cables. A beautiful foot looks as if it's always about to lift its heel and pivot. It provokes thoughts of islands, Nubian beauties, rose-red cities half as old as time, and so on.
Feet can be ugly too. Some believe any and all feet are ugly, that feet are to bodily beauty what chain-link fences are to landscaping.
People can hate feet. ``YOUR UGLIEST BODY PART,'' says the cover of Longevity magazine. Feet get treated as if they were vestigial sex organs that have retained the threat of secretions, odors and diseases that are hard to get rid of. This is feet, the dark side. Women are more apt to distinguish between beautiful and ugly feet, although in the movie ``Boomerang,'' Eddie Murphy gets rid of women if they have ugly ones.
Think of clam-colored feet with ankles that have a sick puffiness, a black toenail on a bunioned big toe that hooks inward, and arches fallen so badly the feet look long dead, like roadkill. Hammertoes! Corns! Warts! You used to see these feet on old men at the Jersey shore, the guys wearing bathing caps and smoking cigars in the water. Toes: spread out like bristles on an old toothbrush; with tiny nails; naked like shell crustaceans; curled under one another like a litter of fetal moles. Red nail polish helps. When the polish is removed, the toes look blind, like tongues, or fish you find only in caves.
When feet get hot and you bare them, you feel the feet radiating not heat but coolness, as if they were mentholated. You expect them to be hypersensitive, like freshly opened blisters. They aren't. About half a million sweat glands breathe their thanks. You splay your toes. All the toes move at once, like brain-damaged Rockettes. How happy they are, the five little piggies.
``This little piggy went to market/ And this little piggy stayed home/ And this little piggy ate roast beef/ And this little piggy had none/ But this little piggy went: WEEWEEWEEWEEWEE ALL THE WAY HOME!''
Going barefoot for the first time in the summer is mildly intoxicating, like a blood pressure pad tightening on your arm. You move with the speculative glide of someone with new shoes, except you feel more entitlement, as if your father owned the shoe company. More than 50 bones are working - about a quarter of all the bones in your body are in your feet.
Every room of a house feels different - feet stick to the kitchen's vinyl tile, no matter how clean it is. In the deep-pile rug of the living room, you leave footprints that evaporate slowly, slowly. Going up stairs, feet are like springs made of meat. If you walk around the house barefoot in the dark, sooner or later you will stub your toe. Maybe a little toe, catching a chair leg. For a second you want to throw up, it hurts so much.
In the yard, gone-to-seed stalks catch between your toes. You feel warmth and roughness, the cooked sidewalk, the coarse grass, as if you'd just acquired a new sense that aimed straight down. At night, you sweep your feet sideways through the dew.
Beware the hideous slug, which sort of ruptures up between your toes. Watch out for dog poop. If you step on a nail, and the nail is rusty, you have to get a tetanus shot. Why would rust give you tetanus? What is tetanus? Isn't it one of the moons of Jupiter? Saturn?
It's easier to go barefoot if you're rich. For one thing, you probably have fewer discarded syringes outside your front door. Your vacations feature clean beaches and clubs with long painted porches, and swimming pools that do not require you to submerge your bare feet in germicidal dip that makes you feel poisoned and demeaned. You take a walk on the beach after dinner. The sand on top is cool. Below, it's warm, holding the day's heat. You can smell the dryness of it. In the morning, the sand on top is warm, and below it's holding the night's cold, and you smell the dampness.
You go out for ice cream. You spill Swiss chocolate on your foot. When it dries, the toes stick together. You struggle to splay them until they come unstuck. You press them together until they're stuck again. The game goes on until you get home and wash them. Clean feet make all of you feel clean, make the house feel clean.
``No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service'' is an American motto. Bare feet threaten some unspoken order. They signal poetry, poverty, freedom, insouciance and oneness. They suggest insanity. They arouse thoughts of karate black belts kicking through cinder blocks; of Saint Francis of Assisi; of devotees of high colonic irrigations; of teen-agers who act as if they own every inch of the town where you rented a summer cottage. (Footnote: A Band-Aid on a bare teen-age foot has a sullen glamour, like zinc oxide on the nose of the lifeguard.)
``Muffled and dumb, like barefoot savages'' - Ralph Waldo Emerson.
It's hard to picture Ralph Waldo Emerson barefoot, though it's easy with his pal Henry David Thoreau out at Walden Pond, in his messianic solitude. Did Emerson ever take off his shoes when he visited Thoreau? Imagine it:
``Put them back on, Ralph,'' Thoreau would say. ``Barefoot isn't you.''
Actress Julia Roberts got married barefoot, according to People magazine. (And her feet were dirty.) Sade sang barefoot on the Jay Leno show. Last year, Calvin Klein had a lot of barefoot models at a fashion show at the Hollywood Bowl. Demi Moore! Drew Barrymore! Mega-waif model Kate Moss says: ``Walking barefoot always makes you feel it's summer.''
The most famous barefoot rebel in American literature is Huckleberry Finn, who ``was always the first boy that went barefoot in the spring and the last to resume leather in the fall. ... In a word, everything that goes to make life precious, that boy had.''
by CNB