That's How These Tootsies Roll

I'll warn you now. If you don't like feet, look away! Read no further. It's not going to be pretty. You may think you know what's coming, but I doubt any of you possess such a twisted imagination, or jacked-up feet, as Val. You may think you know. But you have no idea.

The last time I left the house, which was...uh...the day of the Great Potato Avalanche of '14, if memory serves me correctly, I was on a tight timetable. I was on the phone with my mom, who was hemming and hawing about when and where we should meet so she could get her tasty leftovers to tide her over through the coming blizzard. Never mind that we only meet in one of two regular locations: the Walmart parking lot, or the city park by the out-of-business 7-Eleven. "Okay, Mom. Let's say 40 minutes from when I hang up the phone. It will take me ten minutes to gather up your stuff and put on my socks and shoes. Ten minutes to get to town. Ten minutes to run in and get potatoes. Ten minutes to drive to Walmart. That's 40 minutes. I've gotta go."

Mom likes to linger on the phone. Genius makes a flapping mouth motion with his thumb and fingers when he's trying to say goodbye. The Pony speaks monosyllablically, then suddenly says, "Bye," and hangs up. I let her suck me into another story, and before you know it, I could have driven to her house and back in that amount of time.

Once I started the self-imposed clock ticking, I grabbed my waiting socks from the back of the couch. Wait. I really needed to clip three toenails. Oh, I have more than three toes. That's not the horror. I have a full complement of ten, in the right distribution. Two market-goers, two home-stayers, two roast-beef-havers, two bereft of roast beef, and two homeward-bound-wee-wee-wee-ers. For some reason, three of those little piggies had grown nails of extraordinary length since the last clipping.

Val is not a dainty-footed vixen. Were she a character in The Good Earth, she would be O-lan, not Lotus Flower. Val's feet will never be pampered and pumiced and massaged and oiled and propped up with crimson crescent nails and cotton-ball puffs dividing the digits. Nor will Val be seen parading her podiatric appendages through the village, all decked out in dainty flip-flops. No. You'd best erase any such images from your still-functioning frontal lobe. Last chance. Look away. It's going to get hideous.

Oh, nothing really happens. I didn't slice off a toe or anything. No blood. What do you think I am, a cockatiel? It's just that the description of my feet might be...um...less than appetizing. I don't have long finger-like toes such as The Pony, the ones he uses to pick up a bag of chips off the coffee table. They are stubby, but not so stubby as those of Hick, like vanilla Tootsie Roll Midgies cut in half. If Goldilocks was judging toes solely on length, mine would be almost just right. It's the foot as a whole that is not aesthetically pleasing.

Val does not have a silver-plated manicure set. No shiny nail file for her. She is more needful of a rasp. Like one used by a blacksmith, perhaps. And those giant scissoring hoof chompers. If one was to stumble upon Val's footprints in the mud of a coniferous forest in the Pacific Northwest, the only way one could determine whether to notify the media of the latest BigFoot evidence would be the sheer size of the print. The shapes would be disturbingly similar. Glen Campbell as LaBeouf the Texas Ranger would not dehydrate if he had to rely on Val's muddy hoofprints for hydration.

Oh, I keep them covered. No need to send observers into the Macaulay Culkin cologne version of The Scream. And they're not so diseased-looking as those of Sid the sewer rat in Flushed Away. I don't have the pinky toe that curls under the other toes and is trod upon all the live-long day. No bunion that juts out like a right-angled Plymouth Rock. I can still fit my dogs into Crocs. And sensible school-marm shoes. Nothing fancy. One day I'm sure to be that old lady with a hole cut in her granny-boot so her big toe can stick out. But until then, I'm just a pedicure-challenged ol' gal with feet whose sole purpose (heh, heh, I'm talking about feet and I said 'sole' purpose, get it?) is to transport her from Point A to Points B, C, and the Walmart parking lot within 40 minutes.

I was one minute ahead of the rendezvous time. I attribute my early arrival to the streamlining effect that kicked in after hacking off those three toenails.