Nuts

The break room at my office is always amply stocked with snacks. As I passed through one day, my eyes caught on a big tub of mixed nuts. In my head, I heard the echo of my dance instructor’s voice, at the barre for tondues. “Cashews!” she cried. “I want to see those feet look like cashews!”

I approached the tub of nuts, unscrewed the lid, and poured a small heap into my palm. I popped a pecan into my mouth. I prodded the nuts around in my hand until I came upon a cashew. I contemplated the cashew while I chewed. I popped in a macadamia nut. Still thinking about the cashew.

I looked at my foot.

I would expected that the average member of the human race doesn’t spend a whole lot of time contemplating the foot. If you asked this fabled “average person” to name the parts of the foot, you might get a list including toes, heel, sole, and instep. If the person was a sock knitter, she might point to the hollow below your ankle bone and gush about her favorite type of gusset.

As it turns out, you have twenty-six bones in each foot, plus tendons and muscles and ligaments; it’s an all-together complicated piece of hardware. Why do I know this? Because you can only hear someone yelling at you to roll through your metatarsals so many times before you start to wonder what the hell a metatarsal is.

This was what was going through my mind as I stood in the break room. I looked at my handful of remaining cashews. I looked at my foot. I looked back at the nuts again.

My foot is supposed to do that?

I pointed my foot experimentally. It was clad in a pink sneaker, but really, my worn out sneakers have nothing on my brand new Grishkos. I didn’t think the sneaker was the limiting factor here.

There is a nut in this equation, I thought. In fact, there might be more than one, cashews not withstanding.

I threw the nuts into my mouth, ground them up between my teeth, and let the break room door shut behind me.