This is a repost from my other blog from three years ago, but as I’m currently sitting here without shoes, I thought I would post it here as well.
Some thoughts on going barefoot
Lately I’ve noticed that, without thinking, I have kicked off my shoes and am walking around my house barefoot.
When I was a child we went barefoot all of the time during the summer months. Back then, there were no restrictions on going into restaurants or stores without shoes.
We played in the street, and it would be so hot that the tar with which the streets were patched began to melt and stuck to the bottom of our feet. But our feet were so tough that we didn’t even feel the hot tar. We just couldn’t remove it in the bath. My mom always just said, “Nevermind. It will wear off.”
Photo credit: Goleta History
We rode bicycles barefoot. We made homemade skateboards from old roller skates and actual boards and rode them down the hill barefoot.
Photo credit: freerangekids.com
Scene from the film “Skater Dater,” which I remember seeing when I was young. For years, people laughed at me and told me I was making up that title. But I found the video on YouTube.
As I grew older and began driving a car as a teenager, I drove barefoot. All of my friends did. I remember when we heard that it was illegal in the state of Florida to drive without shoes, and we were horrified because we all had driven barefoot while in Florida on vacation.
Photo credit: Society for Barefoot Living
Even university students walked around campus without shoes. I certainly did. And we went to class barefoot.
Photo credit: LSU Reveille
All of that stopped when I went north to graduate school, and people looked at me as if I had two heads when I went without shoes in warm weather.
Stereotypes abound of people who live in the Southern U.S. in the area known as Appalachia, and that’s where I grew up and currently live. We’re ignorant, backwards, poor, and never wear shoes. That’s what some people still think of us.
But I grew up in a town in a prominent, privileged family, highly educated and certainly not poor. Yet my mother, whose family was the prominent one in that town, never wore shoes during the summer. My father never talked much about his childhood, but according to his sister they grew up in abject poverty. Dad became a prominent inventor and entrepreneur, and I almost never saw him without shoes. So there we have it.
I like going without shoes and am enjoying going shoeless this summer. How about you? Shoes or no shoes?
As always: Slava Ukraini! Слава Україні! #StandWithUkraine
The Appalachian Jew 