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Why not choose to be shoeless?
Anthropologists claim to have found the earliest surviving pair of shoes dating to about 8000 B.C. in, of all places, the state of Oregon. I think I found the second earliest pair when I looked in the back of my closet this morning.
As a child of the Depression, I find it difficult to throw out any item of clothing that has the slightest glimmer of life, especially shoes. In the 1930s many of us sometimes wore shoes with gaping holes in the soles, usually stuffed with cardboard to keep out the elements. Given a proper shine they would pass for respectable at most social occasions except in church where the kneeler's upturned soles were a sure indication of hard times..
Back then there was a shoemaker in every neighborhood who didn't actually make shoes, but repaired old ones. His shop smelled wonderfully of leather and polish and had whirling machine-driven brushes to make our reconditioned shoes look almost new.
But sometimes a family couldn't even come up with the odd dollar for new soles and heels and had to resort to cardboard insoles for awhile. A buddy of mine showed up in school one day wearing a pair of his older sister's shoes with buckles and two-inch heels. We all recognized the problem and asked no questions. Thank goodness I had an older brother for my hand-me-downs.
“Now, I want you to understand,” my mother would say to me. “These new shoes cost four dollars. That's a lot of money and I don't want you ruining them before you've outgrown them which, heaven knows, will be soon enough.”
“Okay, Mom,” I would say, but would soon be lured into a game of Kick-the-Can or would misjudge a jump across a stream or a puddle and both my Thom McAns would be submerged. They would later curl up while drying under the living room radiator and I would be in big trouble again.
The experts theorize that shoes were worn perhaps as far back as 40,000 years ago based on changes noted in fossilized skeletons. Around that time the thickness of the toe bones began to decrease which they believe indicates that cave people were no longer running around barefoot.
But why don't we go back to running around barefoot and let our toe bones thicken up again? Podiatrists say that three out of four Americans are destined for foot trouble as we each walk about a thousand miles a year. Let's eliminate shoes and shoe-caused problems like corns, bunions and crowded closets.
With our tootsies out in the clean fresh air we wouldn't have to deal with athlete's foot, fungus and foot odors. We could cut our clothing budget way back and we wouldn't have to worry about misjudging our jumps over streams and puddles.
Gene Newman is a resident of Parsippany.
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