This is 1 of 9 pages
1.
I have gone through life standing on my toes. Always reaching, always stretching may be okay for practitioners of yoga but for most of us, in time, it gets a bit wearisome. This is a thing of never having enough hours in the day, never getting to the end of one’s “to do” list, and never getting it just right but insisting on doing it one more time.
Going through life on your toes causes funny wear patterns. Your heels don’t wear like most people’s. Instead, it is the front of your footwear and feet that take all the weight and friction. The idea is that by standing on your tiptoes you are higher than your normal self and thus able to see more than you were genetically intended to.
Wearing high heels would be easier and, in fact adding to that, wearing some of those amazing platform shoes would be even better. But most people regard the few who wear these incredible shoes as odd or at the very least, individuals in pursuit of an unmentionable agenda.
Standing on your toes may be hard but I think of the many fences I have looked over. I think of those who built them just above my eye level thinking that this would keep me resignedly in my own back yard. I think about calf muscles that ached from standing stretched out for too long because I just couldn’t get enough of the view. Out there beyond the blinding fence there have been parades and parties, funeral corteges and terrible fights. Out there, the seasons changed more quickly and the sky was red. Out there, people flew through the air while reclining on the faces of elaborate timepieces.
Standing on my toes, I saw Alice falling through the looking glass and then come out again. She looked around and beckoned to me as she went back in. “Now this is my kind of place,” I said. “Of course,” she said.
2.
When our children were young, I had a pair of dark glasses that I told them allowed me to see through women’s clothing. They were amazed and giggled. I was delighted that their innocent laughs were so real and uncluttered by thoughts of sex and perversion. We had good fun then and such peculiar tales from Papa seem to have left them unscathed for they are two very nice and decent people. Sometimes I think it is, in part, because we learned early to laugh about silly things that often had serious meanings.
I think we have made much of things that needn’t have much made of them. We seem to often impart and discern meaning where no meaning needs to be. What we ourselves have come to mean has often had no meaning. I know a guy who invented a jellybean magnet that sucked up candy from Halloween trick or treater’s bags while he distracted their gaze with Oreos that he made materialize from behind his ear like a coin trick. He hated Oreo's but loved jellybeans. This was not child abuse!
Moses played the ponies.
