Barefoot Memories

In today's New York Times Education section, a "trendspotting" piece here talks about the students at Reed College in Oregon and my alma mater, Occidental College, and their propensity to go barefoot.

Here are some of the Oxy shots:





I'm sure alumni all over the nation are saying either, "For shame!" or "That's not a trend! I did that!!"

So let me chime in....I attempted, or at least remember selectively that I attempted, to go shoeless my last term at Oxy (we were still on the quarter system then, so it was a shorter time). My philosophy was, I was going to have to wear shoes for the rest of my life, so I should go shoeless now. Besides, raised in Hawai'i, barefootness was second nature to me.

I still get raised eyebrows from neighbors when, in the dead of Winter, I exit the house shoeless to bring garbage to the curb.

A trend? Hardly. I wasn't the only shoeless student my senior year, Spring term. And I would imagine that the Sixties and Seventies were rife with shoelessness.

UPDATE: Monday morning, my boss walked in with the Times article, acting as if the barefoot students were a bunch of space aliens. Granted, in NYC, going barefoot is a little odd. You may remove your shoes in Sheep's Meadow in Central Park, but most city-dwellers keep their feet shod, as the sidewalks are significantly filthier here than, say, a well-groomed Southern California college campus.

Update 8/9/07: Someone linked this post in a yahoo group and my traffic spiked. If you are reading this and were referred here by that yahoo post, I would ask you to please consider either e-mailing me the text of the post, or cutting and pasting it in the comments section. Just wanting to slake my curiosity. Thank you.