A Lighter View
Soles sold
By K.E.H. Stagg

Sept. 17, 2009

If trying on a bathing suit gives a person heart palpitations, mainly because it’s hard to believe that lumpy old person in the mirror has stolen both my youth and shape, trying on shoes is guaranteed to cause cardiac arrest.

Whose foot serves as the pattern for shape and fit? I’m theorizing that it’s a cross between a ball of rubber and a pipe cleaner, for the flexibility and narrowness required to fit many of the shoes on sale. Like Cinderella’s step-sisters (or step-brothers, if she’d had them), we contort our feet into shapes they were never intended to make, in order to cram them into shoes that are mismarked, mismatched and possibly just not properly made.

Strappy sandals transmogrify into tourniquets after a couple of hours. My feet would yield gallons of blood at the merest pinprick, they are that swollen. Mules require me to curl my toes up in order to keep from walking out of them. I get shin splints just thinking about it! Pointy-toed “cockroach killers” are out of the question, unless I want to have about two inches of empty shoe flopping around in front of me to catch on carpets and trip me up.

I’m not idiotic enough to go for the skyscraper stilettos popular with women either too young to know the excruciating pain they’re in for, or women who work only at night. I like a low heel or flats, with the occasional pair of flip-flops or tennis shoes thrown in for special events. And I’m even lucky enough to have the “standard” size foot: 6 medium. But that’s where my luck ends.

My feet have an arch so small as to be almost indiscernible, which means I need decent support. Too much will make my foot “catch air” across the instep; too little will allow my feet to spread out like a frog on the road after a car has run it over.

My feet don’t “breathe” in plastic, so the fashion for “jelly” shoes and any leather-look material spells a death knell for anyone within the one-mile “kill zone” when I remove said footwear and the mushroom cloud of stench wafts their way.

Heels should be wide enough to bear weight, without looking like they’re made by an orthopedic surgeon to correct a deformity of some kind. Wedges and platforms are better than skinny sticks, but excessive height can undo all the good of a solid, weight-bearing heel.

Honestly, I don’t care who manufactures the shoes, although I’ve learned that certain names indicate the footwear in question has been made on the cheap or out of a suspicious material guaranteed to disintegrate in a matter of weeks.

Really, with all this trouble, I ought to go barefoot. I wouldn’t be allowed in a great many stores or fast food establishments, but that might turn out to be a blessing in disguise: saving money and improving my health while freeing my feet.