The curse of milky and the pizza feet

My mom wrote a song when I was younger. She really is excellent at so many things and I hope to emulate her in a lot of ways But at music, she really is spectacular. So she wrote a song about genes and how certain things are passed down from one generation to another. Part of it that I remember goes like this:

Today I looked in the mirror
And the evidence surely was clear
That the nose on my face
Freckles in every place
Could be seen too on my grandma dear

Maybe those aren't the exact words, but pretty close. Anyway, as I'm reminiscing and thinking about these lyrics, I'm wondering, "Who the heck gave me this pasty white skin and these humongous pizza feet?" There are many other genes that I've been blessed with that I can't really complain about. But lately, these two have got me cursing.

Last week I went outside to help build the shed. I forgot sunscreen and not more than an hour later, I was mistaken for a beet. Not kidding. I know this happens to most people, (well, not the turning into a beet part, but the sunburn part) but I swear I'm way beyond "most people" when it comes to skin. I suppose I'm somewhat translucent. Either that, or very reflective. You know those screens that people hold under their faces to "catch" the sun's rays, I think that is what my skin is composed of. I think maybe, just maybe, I was supposed to be born in the North Pole. I could so easily blend in with the scenery there. There could be worse things in my genes, I'm sure. But did the "let's make this person's skin a lovely dove white" DNA strand really have to get woven into my genetic makeup?

And really, I'm not complaining. I just keep thinking to myself, "Did all of these generations in my family have skin as pasty white as me?" The poor souls. I feel for those pioneers. No wonder they wore bonnets all the time.

I know there are others that share this same milky curse. There was a gymnast on my college team who shared a similar fate. I had another Latina teammate who called her "milky". I know it was in jest, but I couldn't laugh at that nickname, because I could have easily been labeled the same. It's a curse, this lilly-white skin.

Another curse in my family is that we have particularly large feet. Not large in the "long" sense of the word. That would perhaps infer a nice slender set of feet. Delicate and beautiful. No, we have large feet, as in "Uh, I don't think we carry a shoe that wide" kind of feet. This has been my most recent curse.

My running shoes are in a sad state. They have gone well past their 500 mile mark, as I've been wearing them for the past 5 years. So I decided it was time to buck up and buy a new pair. Undaunted I headed to the local sporting goods store to peruse the selection. To my amazement, after trying on nearly 20 pairs of shoes, none of them seemed to be wide enough for me. The very helpful shoe-selling associate informed me that I was a lost cause. Even the shoes designated as "wide" were not wide enough for these pizza feet.

Again, those poor pioneers. They must have had to tie pieces of bark or something around their feet. I'm sure shoes those days couldn't have contained those pioneers' big berthas. They must have gone flopping around like deep sea divers with those custom order bark shoes. It's honestly sad to think about.

Anyway, I learned, as I've been shopping for shoes the past month or so, that I have been wearing the wrong size of shoe for the past 15 years. News to me. Apparently my feet are so wide, that I've been purchasing shoes that are a size larger than they need to be in order to accommodate the width of my feet. Great. I really am a freak.

Still, not to be deterred, I headed to a shoe store nearly 2 hours away that specializes in wide width shoes. I tried on every.single.pair of shoes in my size and width and finally found one that worked. I think I heard the "Hallelujah Chorus" being sung as I found the perfect pair of shoes. My feet were so happy, they were singing the "Hallelujah Chorus" themselves. These shoes are not by any means beautiful specimens of athletic prowess. I look more like a grandma in them than a super cool runner, but I don't care. I guess I'll be a super cool grandma runner....with athletic prowess.

So, I get them home, anxious to run. My first run was fantastic. I was actually smiling as I was running along. Things were great. I was so happy about my new found wide shoes. Things couldn't have been better. Until mile 1. At mile 1 my feet started k.i.l.l.i.n.g. (That was hard to type). Anyway, they really really hurt. Really. I tried not to be a baby and I just kept running. But at about 1.2 miles, I couldn't take it any more. The shoes had to come off.

So that's where I'm at now. Shoeless (well I guess that's not necessarily true. I still have the shoes and can't take them back because I ran outside with them on- ugh!). Anyway...shoeless, sitting here with my wide ol' honkers of feet, wishing there was some sort of shoe fairy godmother that could come and rescue me from this shoe angst. I'm nervous because I have a race coming up in 2 weeks and I don't have shoes to run with. People in Africa run without shoes all the time, right? Maybe I can try that.

In the meantime, I'll just sit here in my sunburned stupor and ponder on where exactly this curse of the milky skin and pizza feet came from. I'd really like to meet the ancestor that started this mess. I truly am blessed to have come from such a great ancestry. The more I read about them, the more I'm inspired by them. But really, next time I get to pick family lines, I'm going with the slender-footed Italians, thankyouverymuch.