A Simple, Cheerful Thing

“No one goes barefoot anymore!” lamented an Arizona neighbor who loved going shoeless. She told me that she used to walk barefoot upon scorching sidewalks in Tucson with a beach towel. She threw the towel in front of her as she walked.

Her words reminded me of a time when Beth and I melted in the 100-plus temperatures, as we walked in D.C. Across the way, a stocky fellow trudged barefooted across the parking lot with his wife. That asphalt must’ve been terribly hot, but he betrayed no discomfort.

I cringed when a family group stood in line with us at a food stand inside a ball park. The mom, with her mom-jeans and team shirt and ball cap, wore no shoes. I worried how safe she could be, plus the grunginess of the park concourse. She needed a towel to stand and walk upon, too!

“No one goes barefoot anymore.” Fads do become quaint; the nonchalance of our younger, student days vanish; jobs and expectations change us, and we lose both a sense of balance and a sense of humor concerning ourselves, and our place in the world. It becomes difficult to let go of ego and do silly, spur-of-the-moment things.

Still, the words of Nadine Strain continue to echo, and the goodness of anticipating regrets. “I’d like to make more mistakes next time. I’d relax. I would limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but… fewer imaginary ones… If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dances. I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick more daisies.”

In the back of my mind, I think going barefoot every so often was a kind of bucket-list thing for me, a way to connect my life’s locations in a humble way, and a series of moments of being spontaneous and silly in this manner. Afterward, I could look back them on nostalgically, as my father liked to remember going hunting barefoot as a kid in the 1920s. For many of us, going barefoot has been a way to express gratitude, in a pleasingly quirky and childish way, for what these posts are actually about: our precious, everyday places and people.

(Some of this piece originally appeared, in a different form, as an essay in Springhouse, April 1988.)