Do you have innocent looking feet?

Tweet

I noted this morning as I washed them, that my feet look quite innocent. Now I generally don’t like feet, particularly the feet of other people and can’t bear to touch anyone else’s feet, nor have anyone touch mine. No pedis for me. But I was amazed at how innocent they looked. It was surprising, especially when I reflect of the things they’ve seen and the places they’ve been over the past 67 years. When they were seven years old the heel of one on them was sliced almost completely off when I slipped in among some cucumber plants in the vegetable patch when I saw a snake heading my way. The heel was hanging on by a thread of skin and since the nearest hospital was 70 miles away on a dirt road in the rainy season that wasn’t an option. A woman poured hydrogen peroxide on it, I’m told. It healed with no damage to the innocence of my feet. When they were about 19 years old my innocent feet visited two brothels every night for a week in Athens. They were above two bars, one called the Bloody Mary the other, next door, called the William of Orange. The first brothel was on the first floor, the second on the second floor, and I had to pass through both to get to the roof where I slept along with several other people passing through Athens. The next year my lovely bare feet were comprehensively vomited upon in a train in India by a 10 year old boy. It was twilight and the rocking motion of the train that had soothed us all for the previous 36 hours as we trundled from Calcutta became too much for the child. That same year I set one of my lovely feet firmly on a sharp something while wading across a river in India. I don’t know what the something was, but it was perfectly round with serrated edge. It hurt. When I was 21 a tall, seriously overweight politician stood on one of my feet in a hospital corridor and that too greatly hurt. And yet somehow my feet have retained their look of innocence and I’m quite pleased with them. And for good measure, my right thumb looks a lot younger than my left thumb.