Joseph L. Kagle, Jr. Essays

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These Little Piggies Went Wa-wa-wa All the Way Home

For years, my daughter and wife have told me, “Your toes are really ugly.” It is true that I have to go to a specialist to cut my toenails (since I have dropped things on them and they now resemble battlements against an invading army). I concede my toes are long and strangely shaped. All this injury has happened over the years but to say they “are really ugly” is going a little too far. Besides, I never look at myself totally from the outside. I am an entity inside with an outside wrapping, like a Christmas present in the eyes of someone who has not lost the joy of being a child.

Sadly, there are days when I look at my toes and instead of seeing them as they are I see them as others might describe them. That was true the other day when I tripped over a projector cord, attempting to give a make-up test to a few students. I drove, then stumbled home and when I took off my shoe two of my right-foot toes were a brilliant red, black and blue. As an artist, I admired their color and wondered how I might use it in a painting but as someone who thought that he might have a broken toe I realized that these little “piggies” were damaged goods.

I am no alone with “ugly” parts. I am sure that others have looked at ears that stood out too far, rolls of fat around an expanding middle, knees with scars all over them from football mishaps and other variations from Michelangelo’s perfect David. The geniuses of Renaissance and Greek art did us no service by creating the ideal. Even those of us who see this traditional ideal as just an “exceptional average” feel the pain of “Those are really ugly toes”. Some days these nasty words hit hard and home. As compensation, my “ugly toes” are part of the majority. Everyone has something which they might like to change if we could have a divine “make over”. Even my critical, almost-perfect daughter was afraid to speak in public through high school and the first years in college until she went to Toastmasters. Now she glories in a spotlight shown on her at her job as company spokesman to fellow workers.

Maybe there is a club for me, “Ugly Toes Anonymous.”  We would meet each Toesday (renaming one day of the week after the patron saint of ugly toes, Leo Toestoy). Our motto might be, “Toes be or not toes be, that is the question!” We would have a mud bath to walk through at each meeting. Sometimes we would meet with the “ugly hands” club and compare digits. Like Rotary, we would recite the four mantras of our being, “Are toes fair to everyone?” “Do we really have to have beneficial toes to exist?” “Can greatness be achieved when our feet are exposed on the ground?” “Do toes really matter?”

With the War in Iraq, a nation too fat to think straight, politicians running ugly, nasty campaigns (even for the highest office in America), most nations in the world hating Americans more than ever and our schools not having the resources to do the job of educating future citizens to make rational decisions in our democracy, are my toes such a big deal. My inside person has glorious, splendid and elegant toes. Remember: “Truth is beauty and beauty truth.” My outside toes just have character (like a late Rembrandt painting after he went bankrupt but kept creating his greatest masterpieces). They are toes which if walking to a stream will get there first most of the time. When moving to Tai Chi, these things at the end of my feet are part of the rhythms in life. On a ballroom floor, I have been told that I “have dancing feet”. Truthfully, as objective as I can be, they are “beautiful toes”. Judge for yourself!