Chaz was petting Kristina’s feet. She had been walking and driving and they were tired.

I liked seeing that because it reminded me how Shirley liked me rubbing and massaging her feet.  She had ballet feet and embodied the flow of movement and did pointe work which still amazes me. 

She wrote a poem about “Feet as an instrument of expression.”

I once wrote a little poem about my own feet, called “Little Feet.”

My feet were always hot, and Shirley used them to warm her. She called them furnaces.

I remembered a sit-com episode where a wiley sneaky kid’s plan for dominance in sibling rivalry backfired, and his earned penance was being assigned to rub his grandmother’s feet, played by Cloris Leachman, they showed him doing it revulsively, and he cried in anguished despair, “Why? Why me? Why?”

When I was young, everybody always wore shoes so you never saw their feet, and I used to think that bare feet were just about the most erotic sexiest part of the body because you never saw them. Nowadays people’s feet hang out, along with everything else.

I loved rubbing Shirley’s feet because it was something I could do as an act of love.

It was a little thing.

I miss all the little things.

They’re big memories.