Looking out of my front door, I saw a young runner approaching the intersection of E. St. Joseph Street and N. Hawthorne Lane. I opened my screen door just as he turned South on Hawthorne, toward Ellenberger Park. My toes curled up involuntarily when I saw that the young man was running without shoes. I have walked those streets many times, and there are very few patches that are smooth and flat. The young man loped along, and I watched his stride. Each foot contacted the ground in what seemed to be a comfortable way, and each of his steps hurt my feet.
When I was a high school freshman, I briefly considered going out for the track team. In the winter months, the team practiced in the basement of the triangular shaped building that was Schenley High School, in Pittsburgh. I could not afford running shoes, so I ran the triangle barefoot. Running around corners puts a lot of stress on the outside of the foot, and after a week of practice, my feet were wrecked. I stopped practicing, and limped home. The following year, I used the funds I had accumulated from my newspaper route and my job at the University of Pittsburgh library to buy my first pair of Bally dress shoes. My shoe fetish was born, and for the most part, my feet have been fashionably shod for years. I have a lot of shoes, most of which were purchased for strolling carpeted halls and tiled floors.
When I went on an expedition with Indiana’s greatest birding expert, Wes Homoya, I asked him what shoes he would recommend for clomping about in the woods. I purchased a pair of the brand he favored, and paid a honking fat price for them, more than I had paid for shoes in years. But the shoes, though sturdy and reliable, are butt-ugly, and coordinate with none of my casual clothing. But now, I spend more time putting my feet to the street, and my cool shoes can’t handle the rocks and rubble. I purchased a pair of walking shoes that don’t abuse my fashion sense, but on some pebbled ground, the going can still be painful.
In the spring and early summer, I will see small clumps of school-aged boys jogging down Hawthorne. They seem to be in training for some running event, but they trot by in a relaxed way, and not one of them is without shoes. In “Exquisite Misery,” (Weekly View, 08/12/2021) I wrote of the curious practice and punishment of running. When I saw that young runner slapping his bare feet onto the street, I thought of Abebe Bikila, the Ethiopian runner who won the 1960 Olympic marathon while running barefoot. Bikila was a surprise substitution when another runner was injured; when he arrived in Rome, he could find no shoes that fit him, so he decided to run without shoes. He won in world-record time, and repeated his win four years later, bare feet slapping the ground for 26 miles.
That young man running down Hawthorne Lane reminded me of a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier. In “Barefoot Boy,” Whittier writes of a “Barefoot boy with cheek of tan!” I could not tell if the running man of Hawthorne Lane had “cheek(s) of tan,” and he did not seem to be in the “exquisite misery” I have seen in other runners as his feet noiselessly struck the ground. But I hope that the close of Whittier’s poem fits his wishes:
“Ah! that thou couldst know thy joy,
Ere it passes, barefoot boy!”
cjon3acd@att.net