Tender Tootsies in the Holy Land

Recently, I was looking at some Renaissance artwork online, and many of the paintings depicted scenes from the Bible. After a while I noticed that almost every person in the paintings was barefoot. Since the terrain of the Holy Land seems to be fairly rocky and harsh, not to mention the likelihood of countless lizards, snakes, and scorpions crawling all over the place, I said to myself, “Man, if I lived in biblical times, I would’ve worn army boots every day.”

But then it dawned on me: oh yeah, they didn’t have army boots back then. In fact, one of the paintings showed Roman soldiers, who were wearing what seemed to be flip-flops with a thin strap around their ankles. How did the Roman army conquer so many nations wearing flip-flops? Can you imagine how many additional countries they would’ve invaded if the soldiers had real army boots? Or even a decent pair of Air Jordan sneakers? (Or, since we’re letting our imaginations run wild at the moment, a couple of Nimitz-class aircraft carriers?)

Anyway, I never would have survived back then, let alone been an effective soldier in the army, because my feet are too tender. This reminds me of a backyard picnic my wife and I attended earlier in the summer. After a while, I took off my sneakers and started walking on the lawn with my bare feet. Within five minutes I was doing the famous “Ah-ooh-ee” dance, where a person tries to walk without putting any weight on his feet and by having each foot touch the ground for no more than a nanosecond. This is impossible, of course, because gravity, being the unreasonable force of nature that it is, doesn’t care whether your feet are in pain. It insists that weight be applied to the ground with each step. And after scarfing down four hot dogs and a quantity of potato salad that could’ve ended the Irish famine of 1845, the amount of weight I applied to the ground with each step was rather significant. Also, I’ve discovered it’s impossible to limit each foot’s contact with the ground to a nanosecond or less, mostly because I have no idea what a nanosecond is.

So, I was doing the “Ah-ooh-ee” dance, and looking about as comfortable as someone trying to walk barefoot across a parking lot strewn with broken glass. But it wasn’t a parking lot; it was a fairly lush, nicely-maintained lawn. Unlike the lawn at my house, this one consisted of real grass, with hardly any weeds or twigs or pebbles. This lawn looked a lot like center field at Fenway Park, and yet my bare feet were in major distress.

I made it back to the lawn chair where I had left my sneakers. Before putting the sneakers back on, I examined my feet, which by this point were pulsating with pain, expanding out four inches in all directions with each heartbeat, then contracting back to normal size, before expanding out again — just like you see in cartoons. I think there were little lightning bolt lines coming off the bottom of my feet, too, the official cartoon symbol for pain (as opposed to wavy lines, which is the official cartoon symbol for something that stinks). OK, maybe the cartoon effects were not really present, but it sure felt that way.

If I cannot even walk across a lush lawn barefoot, there is little chance that I would’ve made a decent apostle in the Bible. I can see Jesus declaring to His followers, “Come, follow me!” And then He pauses, shakes His head and says, “And we’ll wait for Bill to put on his army boots.”