Feet and Memory

I have small feet. It makes walking hard. I also develop blisters even before I put my shoes/boots/sandals on. It’s genetic.

It’s also ironic, because I love walking.

When I was in Boston last weekend I went to the same usual haunts I somehow always manage to get to when I’m there—Mount Auburn, Harvard Square. It was the first time in probably twelve years I’d been in Central Square, though.

Central Square used to be on the dangerous side of funky. There were gunshots routinely on a Saturday night; walking past the Greek mom and pop greasy spoon would subject you to a cascade of cigarette smoke early in the morning or late at night. I lived down Magazine Street and then down Western Avenue. It didn’t feel very scary, but it should have. It was the kind of place I didn’t give too many details about on the phone to my parents.

Once I got over my stupefaction at seeing the Gap and Starbucks as I made my way from the bus stop to the Cambridge Zen Center last Friday, my feet took over.

They remembered the bricks. The sidewalk on Magazine is mostly brick, with a little cement in front of the Greek Orthodox Church parking lot. All of the eight blocks home were buckled from the roots of sidewalk trees that had grown too big for their housings and eventually been cut down but nobody leveled the sidewalk. I knew all the buckles, or rather my feet did.

I trust my feet. They have memory. Sometimes, as during practice at the Zen Center that evening when they had gone to sleep, they have more memory than sense (try standing up on a leg that is 100% asleep; it doesn’t work). But they took my shivering self through the Dell, down the Harvard Square bus ramp, over the hills and dales of the Magazine Street pavement.

Here’s to feet, and the hard work they do for us…