The Man With Tiny Feet.

 

He is a regular-sized man except for his feet.  Good looking, he has a nice personality but his tiny feet are his most interesting feature.  If you are interested in that that kind of thing, you can't help but notice.

Even just standing around waiting for a table or a streetcar, he looks like a ballerina on his tiny feet.  It's a genetic trait.  His parents didn't bind his feet like a Chinese concubine.  Despite that, all his adult life he has walked like one.

It wasn't easy.

If you were an insurance agent, how many clients do you think would like to watch you mince up to the door on little baby feet like you were standing on tip toes, swaying the whole time, and then show you out after signing a contract?  

Don't even try to tell me that the whole time he'd be talking to you from the waist up about insurance from the other side of his desk you wouldn't be thinking of his tiny, tiny feet under the desk.  You would be.  You know you would be.

Who trusts a fully grown man who wears toddler shoes?

People's prejudice against the tiny-footed isn't justified, but being tiny-footed is no way to make a living selling life insurance.

When he was working in a law firm in Chicago, his co-workers would call him Geisha behind his back.  "Shhh.  Here comes Geisha."  The man with tiny feet isn't deaf.

Imagine how easy it would be to trip if you had tiny feet.  It's even worse in reality.

This guy, who was the nicest you guy you can meet, worked a lot of jobs up North, by which I mean Illinois Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Vermont.  To hear him tell it, it was no tiptoe through the tulips.  He wasn't discriminated against but he couldn't keep up on the fast track up the career ladder compared to even his most flat-footed colleagues.  That's when the man with tiny feet decided to move to New Orleans.  

If there is any city in these fifty nifty United States that loves someone who feels awkward everywhere else, New Orleans is here for them.  New Orleans loves them, sight unseen, COD.

So, the man with tiny feet moved to New Orleans is 2016.  He hasn't regretted it except for the one day when he tossed off his flip flops on the Big Lake boardwalk in City Park.  It was a hot afternoon.  It was two weeks ago.  It was 2:00 in the afternoon, which, most summer months, is the hottest time of a New Orleans day.

He wanted to sit on the bench and dangle his tiny toes in the water, so, that's what he did.

A box turtle bit his little left big toe.  The turtle clamped down hard and drew blood.  The minnows started to swarm in the area.

The man with tiny feet pulled his feet out of the water, fast.  The box turtle let go once the man's foot was at maximum velocity, i.e. as the man toppled over backwards off the bench.  It was real slapstick.

The turtle landed in the water on the other side of the boardwalk and hid in the reeds.  A turtle can be smart sometimes.

A crowd gathered, as crowds tend to do at such occasions.  Someone made a makeshift pressure dressing out of his face mask and tied it to the man with tiny feet's tiny left foot.

"You know you've got tiny feet, man," the amateur medic said.

The man with tiny feet just grimaced.  His toe was is so much pain.  He was afraid he would get gangrene, what with all the duck, goose, and swan excrement in the water, not to mention all the turtles and fish.  Nobody has ever claimed that Big Lake is clean.  Nobody.

The man with tiny feet was quite the patient of interest at UMC.  There is nothing like a trip to a medical facility to make a person feel humiliated.  Not everybody, but, if you are a special case, in a teaching hospital like UMC, then every resident and medical student is going to parade behind the doctor into your room to get an eyeful that they may never see again.

That's how the man with tiny feet felt.  "Notice the patient's congenital micropedis," the physician-in-charge would always start his examination.  He was only in the hospital for about two hours.  They gave him antibiotics to take at home.

The man with tiny feet is fine now.  I just came back from visiting him at his house.  He is none the worse for wear.  

He told me, he is used to being noticed for his tiny feet, but he didn't appreciate being a stop on medical student tours every ten minutes.  It's not like he's the only man with tiny feet.  He says he knows how people who live in the French Quarter feel with one ghost tour after another stopping in front of their house.  

There is an international tiny foot society,  My friend with tiny feet is a member.  They meet up every three years in some different city in a different country, all over the world.  He is hoping they could congregate in New Orleans for their next international meeting.  He's trying to pull some strings.

I told him I know the perfect place for people with tiny feet to stay.  Anybody, really, no matter what size their feet.  That place is the sponsor of this blog: 

LA BELLE ESPLANADE

We don't allow comments on this blog because I got tired of deleting all the spam.  If you want to be notified when new posts go up, follow the Facebook Page of our sponsor:  La Belle Esplanade.  You can always comment on their Facebook page.  La Belle has a lively community of 13,500 followers.  Join the club.

Here's the link to La Belle's website if you are looking for a place to stay when you visit this wonderful city we call home.  Visit New Orleans like you belong here.  Like the man with tiny feet, you do belong here.