Putting your best feet forward

While on my mail delivery route Friday I stopped at a bakery for a scone and coffee. I was the only customer except for a teenage girl sitting at a table, eating a pastry, drinking coffee, and talking to the teenage clerk behind the counter.

The counter girl had to make the coffee for me, and as she was preparing the coffeemaker a steady stream of customers came in. Most them were women, almost all young, but a couple of matures. I noticed that each of them, without exception, were wearing sandals, and with the exception of a couple, flip-flop sandals. When I was the Army we called flip-flops shower shoes because we wore them when taking a shower, so as not to get athlete’s foot or some other kind of noxious fungus. I never thought they were very practical; they might’ve been OK for the reason the Army gave, but not for everyday wear. There’s just no support.

Still, it gives a guy like me who likes to look at pretty feet a chance to gawk a little. Most people aren’t very stirred up by feet, no matter how pretty. I always wonder, why then do women go to the trouble and expense to paint their toenails, or to have a pedicure? Since the bakery was in the middle of an affluent neighborhood, most of the women in their flip flops had pedicures.

A man and his wife, who appeared to be in my age group, gave their order and then stood to the side so other customers could order. The teenage girl who was the sole customer in the store when I came in stood up and turned her back to look at something. She was wearing a sweatshirt that was printed on the back:

Sex

Crazed

Underwater

Bad

Ass

An acronym for SCUBA. The mature man and his wife saw the shirt. The girl sat down again. The man looked at me with an expression that seemed to say, “These young people nowadays…”

“Yep,” was a look I gave back.

If the girl had been in school she would have been ordered to remove the shirt, but she could wear it all she wanted outside of school. I wonder if her mom knows she left the house in that shirt? She was blonde, slim, very pretty, real all-American, and yes, she had a pedicure and pretty feet. The message and its tone of sexuality and badness on the back didn’t match the girl from the front.