Tough to put your best foot forward

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/12/2018 (2806 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Just when I thought I knew everything, I learned something new about myself this past week.

I’m not talking about a sudden flash of insight, wherein I discovered that my innermost self is, in fact, terrified of spiders, although come to think of it I am not overly fond of any critter that has almost as many legs as an entire baseball team.

No, the discovery I made had nothing to do with my inner self; it was all about my outer self. To be specific — brace yourselves for a shock — I discovered that one of my feet is bigger than the other.

Seriously, it took me 62 years of life on this planet to discover that my left foot is substantially bigger than my right foot.

It kind of threw me for a loop. I mean, you spend pretty much your entire life under the assumption that you are a normal human being with two feet identical in size, and then suddenly you learn you are, in fact, a freak of nature with a gargantuan left foot that would turn Godzilla green with envy were it not for the fact he is already green.

I am right-handed, so if one of my feet was going to be larger than the other, you would have thought it would the right one, right? But apparently nothing could be further from the truth.

I made this discovery Thursday night when I dragged my wife to the mall to purchase a pair of fancy brown dress shoes to go with my brand-new, tailor-made blue suit, which I planned to wear for the first time Friday night at the St. Andrew’s Society of Winnipeg’s 148th gala dinner, where I was the guest speaker.

Although I am writing these words on Friday morning, I assume I was a huge hit and that the Scottish community has forgiven me for writing cruel, thoughtless columns making fun of (a) the bagpipes and (b) haggis.

But that’s not the point. The point is that, in the process of buying new dress shoes, I accidentally discovered the disparity between my left foot and my right.

I started out trying on about half a dozen pairs of size-12s, and while I was able to slip them onto my right foot with a minimum of effort, I was unable to get the other shoes on my left foot, even with the help of a shoehorn the size of a piano leg, even while standing upright and shrieking at my rogue foot: “GET IN THERE! GET IN THERE!”

As I sat in a chair, surrounded by so many discarded shoes that it resembled the scene in Gone With The Wind, wherein thousands of wounded soldiers litter the floor of a train station, my wife and the shoe salesman looked at me with pity in their eyes.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the shoe clerk said, sighing. “It appears your left foot is much bigger than your right foot. It happens.”

So we moved up to a size-13, which slipped easily onto my normal-sized right foot, but barely squeezed onto my left after a bitter fight. I wish I was kidding, but I am not. It was like trying to stuff 50 pounds of quivering lard into a 25-pound sack, if you catch my drift.

My wife said later that watching me wrestle my left foot into that shoe was like turning to the Discovery Channel and watching a nature documentary in which an angry man tries to choke a mature python as it attempts to swallow one of his feet.

In the end, I bought the shoes because I did not want to disappoint everyone at the St. Andrew’s Society dinner by appearing less than fashionable, and because the salesman assured me the left shoe would likely stretch out in time, kind of the way a baseball glove eventually conforms to the shape of your hand.

When we got home, the first thing I did was park myself at the home computer and Google the words “left foot bigger than right.”

Guess what? It turns out that having one foot bigger than the other is a thing. My search yielded something like 125,000,000 results, including testimony from other hapless guys who had their lives turned upside down when they discovered their lowest appendages were not identical twins.

“Are different-sized feet normal? Absolutely yes! It’s very common and perfectly normal to have feet that are different sizes,” according to the website of the Centre for Foot Care in Cincinnati. “Although (humans) are, for the most part, bilaterally symmetrical, one half of our body may not be an exact mirror of the other.

“In fact, some people have one foot that’s up to three inches bigger than the other! And statistics indicate that about 80 per cent of the U.S. population has a larger left foot than their right foot — with most cases, the difference being one-third of an inch and one-eighth of an inch in length and width, respectively.”

I am forced to ask a difficult question: What’s up with that? Why would one foot be that much bigger than the other, especially when that foot is not on your dominant side?

Here’s what the foot-care centre offered: “One explanation is that since the majority of the population is right-handed, they can only comfortably lift their right hand and left foot forward without losing their balance. Consequently, the foot opposite the dominant hand is exercised more, creating the slight variance in the sizes of the feet.”

There were other explanations, including one about the “psoas muscle,” which can apparently shorten up and pull the arch of that foot up in the middle, thereby making shoe shopping more strenuous than alligator wrestling.

But, as a crusading journalist, I am not going to let the fact that my feet are not equal partners pull the rug out from under me. No, I am going to remain calm and carry on, putting my best foot forward, which means my left, so I will probably end up walking in circles.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca