Putting his Best Foot Forward

Putting his best foot forward

I have hideous feet. With age they’ve become irreparably gnarled, like antique driftwood battered and deformed by the tumultuous seas of life, and they’re criss-crossed by asparagus veins of an indeterminately nauseating colour. Their bones are chipped and broken, the result of a terrible skiing accident in the Swiss Alps when I was 17; getting run over by a bicycle in Montreal in 2019; and more generally wearing inferior footwear because I don’t have a clue.

When I was a child I watched all kinds of idiotic cartoon shows, including one that featured a skunk named Pepe Le Pew:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pep%C3%A9_Le_Pew

His first name notwithstanding, Pepe spoke with a thick French accent, the olfactory challenges that he presented no doubt due to his stereotyped Gallic origins in a nation with standards of hygiene that did not comply with more purist North American norms and procedures.

I always think of Pepe when I behold my feet. Like the little French skunk, these alienated appendages tend to exude a miasmic stench that serves as a sad complement to their consummate ugliness.

But I have discovered a tootsie saviour in my friend and consummate podiatrist, Emile Carrier.

Emile, a former student, is a wizard of the lower extremities, who can get even the most hobbled of decrepit relics, like yours truly, back on their feet, through lucid diagnosis assisted by cutting-edge technology.

He’s a sensitive, highly skilled, new-age, high-tech guy.

In fact I would urge you to limp, shamble, stagger, lumber, totter, shuffle, dodder, or shuffle to his offices in Gatineau, Quebec, where Emile will deliver carefully crafted foot reports and prognoses in the most kindly, diplomatic manner.

(For example in my case, he proclaimed that the broken bone that had been plaguing me for nearly two years was now healed, before slipping in the sad news that a new break had reared its ugly head.)

And he even tolerates the vast array of podiatry jokes and cartoons that an agitated, insufferable codger like me tends to inflict, with the patience of Job, which he claims goes with the job.

https://podiatreplateau.com/en/team/emile-carrier/

https://www.learn-english-today.com/idioms/idiom-categories/body/feet.html

https://www.dailywritingtips.com/50-idioms-about-legs-feet-and-toes/

https://personalexcellence.co/blog/feet/

https://robertmcbrydeauthor.com/

My book titled My Time with You Has Been Short but Very Funny/ Le temps passé avec vous fut bref mais tordant chronicles my terrible skiing accident in the Swiss Alps. The skiing story is titled “Them’s the Breaks”/ Promesses brisées, rêves brisés, cœurs brisés.

https://www.instagram.com/robertmcbrydeauthor/