prompt: barefoot, title: naked, ankles down in misc. flash fiction

“Why do you take your shoes off and perform just in socks?” I’m asked, time to time, I’ll reply, “I’m too germ-phobic to go barefoot.” Which is a very “me” answer, telling technical truth but eliding the heart of the matter with a joke. I usually deflect things like that in casual company as to tell the whole tale might be melancholy and I needn’t be Captain Bringdown all of the time.

Writing, I can edit afterwards, out-loud answers inevitably degenerate into maudlin ramblings.

Still, there’s truth in defensiveness, if I wasn’t obsessive-compulsive about my diabetic toes, I’d just go barefoot. Naked, ankles down. Black socks on scuffed-hardwood floors, my compromise, same as getting a first draft to down to five hundred words. But the long answer goes, as with so many things in my life, my father. I learned taking my shoes off to perform from my Dad.

In his twenties and teens, he played piano in bands, on the weekends to supplement whatever work he had at the time. By the time myself and my brother came along, he quit and took that steady paycheck at the death factory Remington Arms to feed us, but always wished he could make blenders instead. Everyone else seemed proud of forging murder buttons, our father just took the best pay he could get without a degree. For us.

When my father was young, before responsibility precluded such things, he was amazing at the keys. Even in his later years, hands arthritic from factory-slavery, he was still amazing. Back in college, before high-speed-internet in the age of thunder-lizards, I brought him tapes of my radio shows, he’d say “you sound good, but you talk too fast, you’re nervous.” I needed something to blunt the anxiety, a third element to other than the performance and the fear of audience to split my self-consciousness and let myself breathe.

Dad would cross his toes when playing on the stage, it’d center him, break the seal between the two forces, allow him to just be in the moment. Like the surface tension on a boiled-over pot of pasta broken by oil then just play. My father though had dexterous toes I did not inherit, I can’t cross toes on command. I tried a marble in my navel, but it’d always fall out. I tried rocks in my shoe, but my feet would always subconsciously shift the pebbles away.

But just in socks I discovered the difference I needed to break the tension, grounding me literally and figuratively, the nucleation point required to be thinking upon something other than the work and the fear. My father’s wisdom, refit for my own needs. As it should be.

Upon turning forty, passing the line when it’s too late to die young, I’m thinking less about the man I am, more about the man who helped make me who I am. Shuffling wherever the human experience takes me, in just socks, ready for almost anything other than gravel. Thanks, Dad.