What's afoot

Christian Century, March 12, 1997 by Martin E. Marty

Every day in USA Today one can find "USA Snapshots," a little graph showing the results of a survey. Some weeks ago it depicted a man resting his stocking feet on a pie-chart that revealed how many men like to wear what kind of footwear at home. Something about the statistics smelled funny to me.

One-third of, the men said they wore socks. Well and good; knock the shoes off and smell up the house, for all we care. Next most popular was slippers, worn around the house by 28 percent. Again, well and good: what else to do with the new pair received every Christmas? What better comic prop for cartoonists who like to draw dogs fetching newspapers for slipper-clad men? Next are those who really smell tip the place: the 15 percent who go barefoot. I assume these are bachelors or hermits; who'd live with them? Another 14 percent reported that they put on sneakers, and 10 percent don old shoes.

Wait a minute. Poll door-to-door vacuum cleaner salespeople or clergy who visit people in their homes, and ask them about men's soles. Doesn't even one man in a hundred wear the shoes he wore during the working hours?

Had the pollster knocked on my door or penetrated my telephone shield and asked me, I would have had to say: I'm wearing the same black shoes I put on early this morning. In the course of the day I've walked, taught, edited, shopped, done some step-exercising, perused library stacks, jumped puddles, evaded traffic, avoided shoepolishers at the airport, bent down to pick up USA Today from under my hotel room door, stood looking in puzzlement at "USA Snapshots," slid on ice and more. And now here I am, creatively collapsing for an evening at home, perfectly content in those shoes. I don' even feel a need to untie them.

I bet I have plenty of company. Admittedly, I am a special case. My arches having fallen almost the floor back in my youth, I wear "prosthetic devices" -- we used to call them arch supports when they were not custom-made and did not cost $200. It's inconvenient to wrestle them out of shoes and impossible to make them work inside socks, slippers, sneakers or on bare feet. I'm too lazy to slip into something less comfortable.

We who must wear such devices form a club of our own. We set off airport metal-detectors, to the bewilderment of security guards who find it hard to believe we'd be smuggling dangerous materials under our soles. We talk about how we wear the same pair of shoes all day in an effort to avoid changing the prosthetics or buying more of them at high prices. Therefore we tend always to wear decent dress shoes, even on mountain hikes or on the treadmill. We change to comfortable-looking but less comfortable shoes only to make others feel more comfortable.

I'll bet we have company among even those who don't wear arch supports. Perhaps 80 percent of the men polled were wearing better shoes but were too embarrassed to admit it. In the era of grunge, exposing ones smelly feet and socks proves we live the kind of in-your-face (or in-your-nostrils) life that makes us appear modish to opinion-makers and opinion-takers.