Toronto, Ontario
It’s actually difficult for me to wear a shoe on the right foot because it remains enflamed and therefore the shoe doesn’t fit so comfortably. It aggravates the pain. I started to contemplate shoes and the people in them. Shoes are not always practical.
On one occasion our guru, Srila Prabhupada, sat at an airport in Australia with students waiting for his flight. This was in the seventies when fashion trends saw young men in elevated heels called, “stacks”. They would raise your feet 5 or 6 inches off the ground. Prabhupada found it interesting and gave a chuckle.
In the early sixties I recall our dad driving us kids to Detroit to see the zoo and to get there you had to go through the downtown. It was stylish for women to have those almost toothpick thin high heels on. As we stopped for pedestrians it left us a lasting impression of hundreds of stilted shoes criss crossing each other. We would wonder if one of those heels ever got caught in the sidewalk cracks. Surely the stacks of the seventies and the high heels of the sixties created some serious injuries for people. Last summer on the outdoor stage of a festival event a female dignitary sported arrow thin high heels. When she came up to stand at the microphone to deliver her speech her heels had huge clumps of grass and earth stuck on them. She must have changed the landscaping of the park substantially that day.
Anyways, shoes and people are interesting . On display at the Bata shoe museum is a pair of shoes worn previously by some noble in India. The unique device incorporated into the craftsmanship of the shoe is that each time you press down on this piece of footwear, perfume sprays out at the heels. Now that’s some shoe!
Shoes aren’t always for walking. They seem to have other purposes and are often designed not for comfort but for sex appeal. That is the bottom line feature of this worldly existence.
1 comment:
Each time I visited Caracas, Venezuela my Miami-based Puerto Rican colleagues would excitingly point out the beautiful women walking down the street in front of them ... then immediately shop for stiletto pumps for their wives for the very same reason stated in your last paragraph. Seriously they'd spend hundreds of dollars for the proper effect.
Your reaction to that catfish is similar to what happens with a Portuguese man-of-war. I'm happy that your recovery is progressing nicely and your spirit is still soaring!
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