From the age of 14 my mother has worn high heeled shoes.  She told me that it was a different time and that’s what women were expected to wear.  She went along with expectations and never wore flat shoes again.  (She also plucked her eyebrows to the point of extinction, but that has nothing to do with today’s story.)

By her fifties though, styles had changed and it was difficult for her to find casual high heeled shoes.  She bought her first pair of tennis shoes in forty years.  She only wore them a few times because they hurt her feet.  She couldn’t really understand why tennis shoes would hurt her feet, but they did and soon her feet hurt when she walked around the house barefoot too.

Finally she went to the doctor to have them check it out.  The doctor determined that with forty years of wearing high heeled shoes, my mother had developed bone spurs in her feet and that was what was causing the pain.  The only known solution was to continue to wear high heeled shoes.  One Saturday while she was out shopping with her friend Dorothy, they were a J.C. Penny and my mother saw some shoes by Arizona Jean Company.  They looked like Converse All-Stars, but they had thick soles and two and a half inch heals that were about two inches thick.  She bought a pair and they felt so good she bought three more in every color.

My mother has also had a long history of sprained ankles.  She has sprained both of her ankles more times than I can count.  When I was a baby she was carrying me the garage one morning to go somewhere and as she stepped down the one step into the garage her ankle twisted, she went down on one knee and literally threw me across the cement floor – on my head.  (That’s my dropped-on-my-head story.  Don’t we all have one?)

Six months before I moved to California, my mother came home from work one evening, went to the mail box and stepped off a two inch curb wrong.  She went down on both knees.  We thought she had sprained both ankles but after several hours in the emergency room (the pain was worse than she’d ever felt and she could barely walk) it turned out she’d torn ligaments in both ankles and she had air casts on both feet for weeks.

Today, on Twitter, I followed a link to a product that will solve all her problems.  Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Riggledo’s Mom’s Ankle & Foot Reinforcers! They’re ugly as sin, but they’ll get the job done!