Walking stories

Standing on principle and standing on feet

Non-AI summary of the contents: Leah Garchik has her panties – a word she’s throwing in to guarantee readership – in a twist, a knot in which big issues and small torments are intertwined. In the end, she finds a way to not only return to Substack, but also to signal her civic virtue, reinforce a feeling of camaraderie with her neighbors and get rid of her old shoes.

Please note that you might get the most out of reading this, if you wear a ladies’ size nine or nine-and-a-half shoe (gentlemen’s seven or seven).

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I have been walking, and Greenberg has been tugging at the leash, and I have been tormenting myself by trying to figure out why I haven’t written any Walking Stories in months.

On one side of my head, quite close to my ear, is an ogre brandishing a pair of cymbals. He is banging them together as loud as he can. And on the other side, quite close to the other ear, there’s a sadist who won’t stop shaking a pair of maracas. What with all the noise, my impulse is to jump into bed and pull the covers over my head. Thinking is out of the question, and as I make my way up and down our hill, it’s all I can do to stay upright.

To explain the metaphors, the cymbals’ miserable, unavoidable and deafening crash is the state of public affairs. My brain’s been blasted with videos, opinion essays, first-hand reports and bloviation from experts. It hurts, it’s making me crazy, and I have little original to add to the commentary.

I can demonstrate, I can put a sign in the window, I can calm myself by trading parallel opinions with like-minded friends. But raised in the era when we believed if we weren’t part of the solution we were part of the problem, my sense is that it’s not enough. Those cymbals won’t let up.

Day after day, the noise makes it clear that peace is not at hand, that innocents are suffering, that there are few limits on immorality when evil people rule. Some friends are taking news siestas, refusing to listen to the daily bombardment. But history has taught us that this self-imposed zombification is wrong; “We didn’t know” is no excuse. Decent people are obligated to take note of events that are indecent.

Meanwhile, the simultaneous maraca noise, far less loud but I have to admit equally attention-grabbing, has been from within: my own body. It’s not sexy to admit, but the truth is that for six months or so my feet have been aching. (See, sooner or later, I was planning to get to the Walking Story connection.) On the worst days, every step has been causing a wince.

It’s my right heel mainly, it’s plantar fasciitis, and it’s boring, so I will exercise self-control and omit details about it. But I can’t ignore the walking, oh the walking. Greenberg scampers down the sidewalk, and if I spot my reflection in a store window, I’m brought up short when I realize that the sprightly galoot I was before this all began has been replaced by a tottering crone.

All this to say I have been frantically ricocheting between compassion for the undocumented and for the people of Minneapolis, and misery over my aching foot. All this topped off by a pervasive feeling of guilt over being able to wallow in my ridiculous old lady woes when compared with those of people whose families and lives are being torn apart.

But lo, look on the horizon, I tell myself. In the past few days, a light at the end of this personal podiatric tunnel has glimmered. It may be the cortisone shot, or the new inserts or the heel lift or the shoes or the compression socks or the athletic tape or the exercises or the two physical therapists (the second when I broke my wrist in a fall due to unsteady footing), but I think it’s possible my foot issue is on the run.

That’s not to say that everything will return to what was once normal. I am trying to accept that even if I get totally healed, I have to accept some change. And what I am left with, embarrassingly, is shoes, all kinds of shoes that I don’t want to risk wearing, both because I don’t want to exacerbate the current problem and because I don’t want to look like an old lady clawing at youth. My role model is not Cher; it’s Georgia O’Keeffe.

Strangely, here’s where the two parts of this essay merge:

I would run upstairs right now and count how many shoes I own, but I’m going to estimate: a lot. And working my way out of this current foot crisis, I have come to realize that there are many I’ll never wear again. My shoe racks are lined with stilettos (heels too high), moccasins (no arch support), and many other fetching but similarly impractical options. The collection includes riding boots, roping boots, cowboy boots. I guess my image of myself hasn’t always been Georgia O’Keeffe; it used to be Dale Evans.

Right now, having been forced to purchase shoes in the kind of store where the salespeople take pride in being amateur podiatrists, I won’t take a chance on wearing shoes that might put me back in wincing mode. It breaks my heart but the shoes gotta go.

That might silence the clatter of the maracas, but what do about those crashing cymbals, the unavoidable reality of what’s going on in Minneapolis and elsewhere?

A few days ago I got an e-mail from a neighbor. “A few neighbors and friends will be hosting a fundraiser to support MN’s heroic resistance to ICE on Saturday, Feb. 7, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on the NW corner of Page & Baker,” wrote one public-spirited organizer. The money will be donated to immigrant defense groups, minority organizations, interfaith councils, social service agencies, legal aid, food providers and the like (as enumerated on standwithminnesota.com).

I will be there with a serious sense of purpose, selling boots I bought with thoughts of hopping, skipping, jumping and maybe even line-dancing. I do want to Stand With Minnesota. My feet are absolutely demanding it.

Come on down, and bring your feet. .