I have a bunion.  It hurts.  It’s an obnoxious little knob that sends sharp pains radiating through my foot.  I don’t even have to be walking.  Sometimes I am just sitting there, and the pain starts.  A bunion (from the Latin “bunio”, meaning “enlargement”) is formed when the big toe turns inward toward the other toes, forcing the joint of the big toe and the foot outward.  It is officially a deformity.  I’m deformed.

There are treatments to alleviate the pain, and for desperate cases, surgery.   But the foot is a complicated piece of skeletal machinery, and it is does not reconstruct well.  My physician recommended I consider surgery about the time the pain became so intense I would consider amputation a viable therapy.  Otherwise, she suggested, “Live with it.”

I owe this handicap to stiletto heels.  When I was young, these were quite the rage, as they seem to be again.  We even wore heels to high school, unlike teenage girls today, who are either indistinguishable from the boys, or whose fashion focus seems entirely upon exposing the abdomen.  Four years later, I was still in high heels.   I walked on concrete all over the Berkeley campus in white pearlescent plastic pumps, red strappy sandals, shiny black pumps with bows on the toes.  I must have had 30 pairs of shoes.   Of course, there was the Birkenstock faction, this was Berkeley after all, but comfort wasn’t fashionable, and I never was an earth mama.

I remember one particular day wearing above said red strappy sandals.  They had 3 ½ inch stacked pointy heels.  I wore white pedal pushers, and a red and white striped T-shirt, my book bag jauntily hanging from my shoulder.  I owned a backpack, of course, but that was for flats.  Heels required the book bag, even though it really hurt to hang 25 pounds of books from my shoulder.  As I was walking across Kroeger Plaza, past the architectural building, a very aggressive bee decided I either looked like the best nectar producing flower he’d seen all day, or that I was definitely competition and must be eliminated.  All I know is this darn bee chased me across the plaza to Bancroft Avenue, and partway up the street, uphill.  I ran as fast as my well-shod feet could go.  But I looked good.  Back then, I could run in heels.  Now I couldn’t even limp across the plaza in anything higher than Keds. 

So, my bunion is a souvenir of my darling little outfits of the 70’s and 80’s.  Constantly putting my body weight on the ball of my foot, and squeezing my fat little feet into pointy toe boxes, has left me with the cretin foot I have today.  But perhaps, upon reflection, I should wear my deformity proudly.  It is a badge of courage, an undeniable mark of fashion fortitude.  My foot knob silently proclaims that I was willing to sacrifice life and limb, or at least extremities, to look sharp.   It sticks out between the straps of sandals, and leaves a fixed bulge in leathers.  It is a permanent remnant of my youth.  Like stretch marks from childbirth, it is the price I paid for something greater than myself.